News & Events
Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health faculty promotions in 2024
Congratulations to Michelle Averill, Anne Lund, and Jennifer Otten, core faculty in the University of Washington Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program in the UW School of Public Health, who have received promotions effective July 1, 2024.
Michelle Averill
Promoted to Teaching Professor
Michelle Averill has been promoted from associate teaching professor to teaching professor. Averill is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, and core faculty and interim director of the Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program. She is also the associate director of the Graduate Coordinated Program in Dietetics (GCPD) and a member of several professional organizations, including the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition and the American Society of Nutrition.
Averill’s interest areas include addressing weight stigma and encouraging students to challenge the standard narrative related to weight and health. Through collaborative work with colleague Cristen L. Harris and students in the GCPD, Averill formed an informal peer advising group in weight stigma & bias topics in 2021 which provided a forum for faculty and students to discuss eating competence, child feeding dynamics, weight stigma/bias, and more.
Furthering work in the area of eating competence, Averill and Harris co-authored a paper in 2023 on a study they conducted on weight- and body-related attitudes and behaviors being predicative of eating competence among college students.
Averill and Harris have continued this work to develop a registry of individuals that can be used in future longitudinal studies to assess the relationship between eating competence, life course events, and daily hassles. This work was a collaboration with UW graduate student Khang Ho who was instrumental in getting the project off the ground.
Averill is also leading a PhotoVoice project planned to launch in autumn 2024 which will capture UW students’ experience with food insecurity through photos and focus groups.
More about Michelle Averill
Anne Lund
Promoted to Teaching Professor
Anne Lund was promoted to teaching professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington, and core faculty in the Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program. Lund is also the director of the Graduate Coordinated Program in Dietetics (GCPD), the program’s RDN training program, and is the director of the MPH-Nutrition degree.
Through Lund’s leadership, these programs have expanded to include new and creative workshops and opportunities which allow students to examine their own cultural and racial identities, and understand how common nutrition messages within the profession are framed primarily for the dominant culture.
Lund has been engaged in this work for many years, but in spring 2024 introduced a new arts-based workshop which challenged students to visually explore their identities as professionals in dietetics by creating art which expressed an overlap of traits “about them” which they perceived would improve the care they provided to the patients and communities they served.
Developing an arts based workshop for a science based graduate program is an achievement Lund was thrilled to add to the evolving dietetic curriculum. In collaboration with GCPD Associate Director Michelle Averill, they’ve spent the previous decade shaping the curriculum to prepare students for their careers after graduate school. Lund said, “Michelle and I built the dietetic program curriculum to provide advanced skills in public health practice and acute clinical care. Now that we are pleased with both the depth and breath of the curriculum, we have the ability to focus on developing content that will help our students become even better clinical and public health providers.”
Read more about Lund’s work in equity, diversity, and inclusion into UW dietetics in this Q&A from March 2023.
More about Anne Lund
Jennifer Otten
Promoted to Professor
Jennifer Otten has been promoted from associate professor to professor with tenure. Otten is a professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington. She is a core faculty member and undergraduate program director in the Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program, and adjunct faculty in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.
Otten’s research, policy, and education activities focus on advancing change at the intersection of food systems, nutrition, and public health.
Recent works include:
- Food Security, Food Access, and Traditional Foods across Pacific Northwest Tribal Communities in the Wake of COVID-19: Findings from the NW Tribal Food Sovereignty Survey (PDF)
- Food Security and Food Assistance in the Wake of COVID-19: A 4th Survey of Washington State Households
- A call for collaboration among food systems programs in higher education to train the future workforce
- Complexity and tradeoffs in animal agriculture sustainability: building awareness and trust between producers and consumers
In June, Otten was elected president of the Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society (AFHVS), a professional organization which provides an international forum to engage in the cross-disciplinary study of food, agriculture, and health, as well as an opportunity for examining the values that underlie various visions of food and agricultural system. She will serve as president-elect in 2024-2025 and president in 2025-2026.More about Jennifer Otten
July 19, 2024