Professor recognized for nutrition education work

‌

Barbara Lohse

Rochester Institute of Technology professor Barbara Lohse was awarded the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior Research Award for outstanding achievement in the field of nutrition education.

Lohse, head of RIT’s Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition, was recognized at the society’s annual conference in San Diego on July 31.

Lohse has won more than $20 million in funding for nutrition education and has published 54 peer-reviewed articles. Her programs and services are the foundation of the Nutrition Education Engineering and Designs Center, or NEEDS, in RIT’s College of Health Sciences and Technology.

The center includes programs based on collaborations with colleague Ellyn Satter, senior faculty member at the Ellyn Satter Institute, on eating competence and nutrition education programming for pre-school children and young adults, and Lohse’s “About Eating,” an online curriculum for low-income households. The NEEDS center grew from Lohse’s leadership of the SNAP-Ed-funded research programs during her tenure at Pennsylvania State University.

In a current project, Lohse and colleague Leslie Cunningham-Sabo, associate professor at Colorado State University, are collaborating on research, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which explores how teaching children to learn to cook can impact their health and nutrition and that of their family.

“Nutrition education is more than what and how much to eat—it’s about the eating experience and how it integrates with lifestyle, values and resources to contribute to a healthy society,” Lohse said.