Current Members

Mahsa Jessri

(View Dr. Mahsa Jessri’s bio here)

Sappho Gilbert

Dr. Sappho Gilbert is a T32 postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Within Dr. Jessri’s NEPoH team, She collaborates on ongoing projects from her time as PhD UBC/Yale fox fellow in NEPoH lab in the areas of population nutrition, food policy, and community and Indigenous health (primarily focused on the Canadian Arctic). Her research portfolio also extends into food security, climate change, and research ethics. Sappho earned her PhD at the Yale School of Public Health, Master’s in Public Health at Dartmouth College, and Bachelor of Science in biology with a minor in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Saba Jalali

Saba is a doctoral student in Human Nutrition at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Mahsa Jessri. Her research interests include dietary patterns, nutritional epidemiology, and disease prevention. She holds a BSc and an MSc in Nutritional Sciences from the Shaheed Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Saba has 5 years of experience as a researcher at the Urology and Nephrology Research Center in Tehran, Iran.

Estimated Life Expectancy: 90 Years

Qiuyu (Julia) Chen

Julia is a Registered Dietitian and PhD Student in Human Nutrition (specializing in Nutritional Epidemiology) at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include nutrient profiling systems, nutrition policies, disease prevention, and children’s health. She has a BSc in Food, Nutrition and Health major in Dietetics from the University of British Columbia.

Estimated Life Expectancy: 92 Years

Yifei (Amber) Wang

Amber is a graduate student in the Master of Science in Human Nutrition program (specialization: Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Analytics) at the University of British Columbia  under the supervision of Dr. Mahsa Jessri. Her research interests include nutrition epidemiology, public health policy,  population health, and healthcare expenditure. She has a Master of Science degree in Data Analytics from Tufts University.

Cameron Smith

Cameron is a PhD Student in Human Nutrition at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include data-driven decisionmaking, multi-sectoral policies, chronic disease prevention, and food security. She has an MPH in Health Systems and Policy from Johns Hopkins University (MD, USA) and a BA in Mass Communications with a minor in Public Health from the University of South Carolina (SC, USA).

Rachele Bianco

Dr. Rachele Bianco is a visiting doctoral student at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Jessri. Her research explores the use of machine learning to improve traditional dietary assessment tools and investigates the impact of dietary patterns on health outcomes. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences at the University of Udine (Italy), and she holds a BSc and an MSc in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Milan.

Gladys Quezada

Gladys is a visiting doctoral student at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Dr. Mahsa Jessri. She is pursuing a PhD in Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Gladys has a Master’s in Public Health and is an assistant professor at the Universidad del Bío-Bío in Chile. Trained as a nutritionist, her research areas include nutritional epidemiology, with an emphasis on dietary patterns, obesity, and non-communicable diseases. She also focuses on population nutrition and sustainable food systems to contribute to public health improvement.

Yuchen Jia

Yuchen is a graduate student in the Master of Science in Human Nutrition program (specialization: Nutrition Epidemiology) at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Mahsa Jessri. Her research interests include nutrition epidemiology, public health nutrition policy, chronic disease prevention, simulation modeling, and health equity. She holds an HBSc with majors in Nutritional Science, Health and Disease, and a minor in Statistics from the University of Toronto.

Dahlia Parolin

Dahlia is a research assistant pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Dietetics. She is currently involved in projects investigating the health and economic impacts of front-of-pack nutrition labels and food marketing to children. Her research interests include chronic disease prevention, nutritional epidemiology, and public health policy.

Estimated Life Expectancy: 89 Years

Adrianne Chow

Adrianne is a Dietetics (BSc) and Masters of Management Dual Degree student. She is passionate about pediatric nutrition and population health. She supports the NEPoH Lab in various qualitative research tasks. 

Gabriela Piekarczyk

Gabriela is a research assistant pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Dietetics. Her passion in learning about public health, social determinants of health and food security has led her to get involved with NEPoH. She is currently involved in projects investigating food marketing to children.

Estimated Life Expectancy: 89 Years

Rose Xia

Rose is a dietetics student at the University of British Columbia. She is currently contributing to a project on food replacements to inform policies on marketing to children. Her research interests include dietary pattern modelling and informing public health policy to reduce the burden of disease.

Xianyuan Zhang

Xiaoyuan is a research assistant majoring in Statistics at the University of British Columbia. His current work at NEPoH involves applying natural language processing and machine learning methods to identify suitable replacements for restricted food items in the BNS food group dataset, as part of the lab’s broader efforts to improve child nutrition health. Xiaoyuan brings prior experience from industry, and his interests include public health data science, algorithm-aided decision-making, and large-scale clinical data analysis.

Estimated Life Expectancy: 90 Years