There are many ways in which science informs and improves upon how food systems work. Science is used in agricultural and biotechnology research to improve safety and yields of crops, sustainably. It is used on population scales to identify where policies and strategies work best and where the shortfalls are. Science is also used in the lab to understand how nutrition impacts our health. The science of food systems takes many different forms, from economics, to public health, to basic lab science, to computer modeling.
Here are some areas at Tufts where science is featured in food systems work!
The Graduate School of Biomedical Science, where the frontiers of cell and molecular biology are being explored, adding to our understanding of how biology, nutrition, and health are related. Understanding biology at these scales is as important as understanding global ecology, as food systems encompass components from the molecular and cellular to the ecological and sociological.
The School of Engineering has activities spanning scientific fields from bioengineering to hydrology to structural engineering. One of the primary goals of the education and research at the School of Engineering is to identify and elucidate knowledge gaps within these fields. Pushing the boundaries of engineering in areas from genetics to river systems to renewable energy solutions is vital to creating tomorrow’s food systems.
The Initiative for the Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases (InForMID) is a group within the School of Engineering that works fields of science such as bioinformatics and epidemiology. These are other areas of science that, taken together with other fields, make up important parts of our understanding of complex systems. Using science to improve models is vital to optimizing food systems for sustainability, equity, health, and other metrics.
The Public Health program within the School of Medicine contains several areas of science, such as nutrition, epidemiology, and behavioral science that comprise an important piece of understanding food systems. In order to improve food systems, we need ways to empirically evaluate public health to ensure food systems.