Melissa Fuster, PhD

Dr. Melissa Fuster is an Associate Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the Tulane University Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Her interdisciplinary research examines the cultural and structural factors shaping food practices and the implementation and effects of policies and interventions designed to improve food environments. Her work draws on implementation science, human-centered design, systems thinking, and food studies, with particular attention to restaurants, institutional food settings, and communities experiencing diet-related inequities.

Dr. Fuster’s earlier research examined food, migration, health, and race among Latin American and Caribbean communities, as presented in her book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City. Her current research focuses on the implementation and evaluation of food environment policies and interventions. This includes evaluating New Orleans’ healthy default beverage ordinance in collaboration with Xavier University of Louisiana; developing measures to assess the behavioral determinants of customers’ food choices in restaurants; and evaluating foodservice initiatives designed to promote healthier choices. Through the Voices at the Table project, she also worked with Black and Latin restaurant stakeholders in New Orleans to co-develop policy and systems solutions supporting healthier, more environmentally sustainable restaurant environments.

Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and her Social Entrepreneurship Professorship at Tulane’s Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. She is a Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy’s Center for Systems and Community Design and a member of the editorial collective for Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. Dr. Fuster earned her PhD in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in food studies at New York University. Before joining Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Before joining the faculty at Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York Brooklyn College.