Ana Clara da Fonseca Leitão Duran

I am a nutritional epidemiologist driven by the strong belief that a less unequal world is key to making it healthier and happier to all. My research interests revolve around finding ways to make healthier choices easier for individuals considering the wide social, racial and gender disparities that drive inequalities in health and in the access to healthy foods. I am a research scientist and an assistant professor in the Graduate Program of Collective Health at the University of Campinas as well as a research fellow at the Center for Epidemiological Studies in Nutrition in Health, known by the acronym NUPENS, a research center based at the University of Sao Paulo School of Public Health in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Trained as a dietitian and later in social and nutritional epidemiology, ever since my PhD studies taken at the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Michigan, I have been working with measurements of the food environment. I am currently working on generating evidence for, and then evaluating policies aimed at improving the food environment. I strongly believe that food is too important to be dealt by just one discipline or in silos. Because of that, over the past 10 years, I have sought to learn from political science, economics, geography, urban planning, anthropology, and food science, as well as collaborate with scientists from all these fields. Upon the completion of my PhD, I served as a consultant for UNESCO working alongside with the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development on evaluation studies of the Brazilian conditional cash transfer Programa Bolsa Familia. This experience has introduced me to the world of policy evaluation and influenced my career goals. I am currently working on research projects funded by Brazilian and international funders focused on understanding the relationships between social and commercial determinants of health and diet and obesity and diet in Brazil, the United States, and more recently Peru, Chile, and Argentina. I have also consulted for national and local governments, and, for the past three years, I have worked alongside talented food and nutrition advocates. I teach an Epidemiology course for graduate students and supervise Honor Undergraduate Students in Nutrition. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)