Riddet nutrition researcher enjoying Harvard post as Visiting Scientist

6 August 2024 - Massey University nutrition scientist Barbara Burlingame has just commenced a six-month post as Visiting Scientist at Harvard University.

The Riddet Institute Adjunct Professor is working at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health where she will be continuing her research in nutrition, food systems, sustainable diets, and biodiversity for food and nutrition, with a particular emphasis on indigenous peoples and indigenous food and knowledge systems. This has been a mainstay of her work for more than three decades.

Originally from the United States, Dr Burlingame is an expert on sustainable diets, working with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for many years. Her indigenous peoples’ work is a pillar of the FAO’s current focus, rooted in its 2030 agenda and sustainable development goals.

She says it is a stimulating intellectual environment at Harvard.

“The scholarly environment at Harvard is unsurpassed, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to be immersed in it,” Dr Burlingame says, two weeks into the Visiting Scientist role. “I’m particularly impressed by quality intellectual discussion and debate, both esoteric and with practical applications.

“Nothing is taken for granted, with established ‘facts’ and dogma as ripe for re-examination as new and emerging findings.” 

A key aspect of Dr Burlingame’s work as Chief of Nutrition at the UN’s FAO, and later at Massey University and the Riddet Institute, involves a rights-based approach to evidence-based policies and programmes, and she will advance this activity at Harvard by exploring with the American Civil Liberties Union issues of violations of human rights linked to the diets and food environments of indigenous youth.  

Dr Burlingame says she is working with world-renowned scientists in the Nutrition Department at Harvard, including Professor Walter Willett, who 20 years ago did his sabbatical with her at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome. 

She will also begin working on the second edition of her book Sustainable Diets, Linking Nutrition and Food Systems, to be published by CABI in 2025.

Dr Burlingame will return to New Zealand in 2025.