RESEARCH
Research Portfolio
For years, I have been growing as a researcher, from small projects to big ones. Let me show you.
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HOW I BEGAN
Evaluation of the University of Rhode Island's Food Environment and Student
Perceptions of On Campus Dining
In 2019, I really had no clue what research entailed but knew I had to give it a shot. After a month of looking through different labs, I found the BYTE lab (Big Data and Eating Decisions Lab) which focused on a more environmental focus on population health. I started off by doing small projects such as learning how to do codes for a colleague and listening to conversations that were so complex they didn’t even sound like English.
However, over time I became a contributor to this piece as I learned to understand what I was coding and why I was doing it in the first place. We were focusing on how coupons could influence the shopper’s decisions in a grocery store. I would code products in the store so that we could make it easier to determine what percentage of the cart had fruits, vegetables, added sugars, and other items and how the coupons affected their purchases that day.
This was that article “Effect of Personalized Incentives on Dietary Quality of Groceries Purchased: A Randomized Crossover Trial”: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2776097?resultClick=3
Once I started to get the hang of things, my professor encouraged me to begin my honors project early (similar to a capstone project). I wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on until one day I was sitting in the dining hall and noticed the students’ decisions on what they wanted to eat. The dining hall offered healthy lettuce wraps with ground chicken that day and salmon but the students seemed to take one look and immediately find something else to eat. After some discussion, I realized that I wanted to first figure out the nutrition behind the dining hall, and then find out how the students perceive the foods.
The photos above are pictures I took during an initial look at the dining hall when getting a tour by the dining hall dietitian. Prior to this point, I created a checklist using the Partnership for a Healthier America’s Healthier Campus Initiative as an evaluation tool. The program’s point was to create guidelines to follow to have a healthier campus in general, but I took information from the food section written in the guidelines. I led a team of 2 undergraduate students and visited the dining hall weekly at different times to see how well they followed the requirements. I received a $2,000 grant to complete my first outcome by that summer.
MY TIME AS A SNAP OUTREACH WORKER
That summer I also worked for the URI Hunger Center as an outreach worker. We traveled around the state post-COVID (2021) helping older adults to apply to SNAP or help them with their current case. All of this data was compiled for the Rhode Island Summer Undergraduate Research Conference where we prepared a poster to present. This helped increase my skills in organizing data and making it accessible to readers of all education levels.
CURRENTLY WORKING ON...
Now that I have completed my first outcome of the honors project (at this point I am hopeful for its publication), I created a survey to address the second outcome: student opinions of the dining hall. I sent the survey out to the entire college through email and am waiting on results now. The survey was broken up into their food preference, opinions of the dining hall, opinions of its sustainability (a possible third outcome I wanted to explore) and their overall satisfaction of the dining halls. Once I have results compiled from both outcomes, I will be able to come up with recommendations on how to improve the dining hall. Wish me luck!