Speaker:

Kayla de la Haye - Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, Director, USC Center for Applied Network Analysis, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

Title:

Promoting Healthy Eating through Local and Global Networks

Abstract:

Poor diets are a major cause of common ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Although eating is often conceptualized as an individual behavior, the evidence shows that it is shaped by social and environmental forces that are insufficiently addressed in many interventions. This talk describes how complex social networks of family, friends, peers, and community stakeholders influence what people eat, and how interventions and policy can target social architecture and choice architecture to promote healthy nutrition. I emphasize the important role of innovative network and data science methods, big data, and transdisciplinary team science to advance this work.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. de la Haye is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. She works to promote health and prevent disease by applying social network analysis and systems science. Her research, funded by the NIH, the NSF, and the DoD, targets family and community social networks to promote healthy eating and prevent childhood obesity, and to understand the role of social networks in group problem solving in families, teams, and coalitions. She is Treasurer of the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA), and in 2018, she received the INSNA Freeman Award for significant contributions to the study of social structure.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between.

Live Stream:

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