Melissa Fuster is Associate Professor of Public Health Nutrition at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Her research examines the contextual and cultural factors influencing food practices using a multidisciplinary approach with a focus on Latin America and its diaspora communities. Her community-based research experience has sought to address diet-related disparities, aiming to shift emphasis to upstream approaches that engage the structural factors that underlie access to healthy food and high-quality healthcare, which is the subject of her first book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City. Building on this work, Dr. Fuster’s is currently tackling food access issues via the Latin American Restaurants in Action (LARiA) Project, an initiative to engage restaurants to facilitate healthier eating. She completed her Ph.D. in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and a post-doctoral fellowship in food studies at New York University. Before joining the faculty at Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York.
