11:30 am – 11:45 am — Registration Open
11:45 am – 12:00 pm — Opening Remarks & Kickoff
Welcome and framing of the day’s theme by organizers.
Speaker(s): Dr. Mary Davis
Mary Davis
Senior Associate Vice Provost for Education, Provost’s Office; Associate Professor, Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Associate Professor, Economics
Dr. Mary Davis is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and the Senior Associate Vice Provost for Education at Tufts. Professor Davis’ research explores the relationship between work and well-being as a universal human experience. An interdisciplinary labor economist and public health scientist by training, Dr. Davis studies a wide range of occupational groups, from fishers in coastal Maine to sweatshop workers in Vietnam and beyond. In a recent study funded by the US Department of Labor, she examined whether gig economy workers suffer worse health outcomes than hourly paid employees. These findings shed light on the inequality of health outcomes for low-income, minority, and female workers, both domestic and international. Dr. Davis was honored by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine with the award for best publication in 2021 for her work on the health effects of night and irregular shifts. Her first book entitled Jobs, Health, and the Meaning of Work (MIT Press, 2024) was published in 2024. Her most recent work focuses on the labor market and work experience of nurses, using an anthropological approach to explore the challenges and opportunities for the profession and the US healthcare system more broadly.
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm — Lightning Talks
Speaker(s): Jennifer Carpenter, Dr. Eliza Dutta, Dr. Michael Foley
Eliza Dutta
Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow and Visiting Scientist; Tufts Friedman School Concentration in Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science & Indian Institute of Public Health Shillong, India
I am trained in epidemiology, with over a decade of experience in public health research. My work focuses on women’s cancers, environmental exposures, evidence-based policy, and development of analytical methods in public health. I am involved in multiple projects exploring the burden of disease and interventions for cancers in the northeastern regions of India. I am particularly interested in understanding the stories behind the data and how they inform meaningful analysis and public health action.
Michael Foley
Climate Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Michael Foley is a Climate Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard in 2024. He helps lead HarvestStat, an international initiative building the world’s most comprehensive datasets of subnational crop yield information. HarvestStat Africa was recently released, with HarvestStat Asia and HarvestStat MENA currently in preparation. His broader interests include data visualization and science communication, and he is involved in several efforts to make scientific information more accessible and engaging for both researchers and the public.
Jennifer Carpenter
PhD Candidate at Tufts Friedman School Concentration in Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science
I am a third-year PhD candidate in Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. I hold M.S. degrees in Nutrition and Exercise Physiology from San Diego State University and in Nutrition from Baylor University. A practicing Registered Dietitian since 2016, my work bridges nutrition science, epidemiology, and data-driven approaches to improve health outcomes.
1:00 – 2:30 pm — Panel Discussion: “Is Your Data Ready for AI?”
Moderator: Dr. Elena Naumova
Speaker(s): Dr. Eleanor Shonkoff, Peter Nadel, Dasha Agoulnik
Elena Naumova
Professor, Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science Division; Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University; AAAS Fellow, Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Public Health Policy, Springer Nature
Dr. Naumova’s research activities span a broad range of research programs in emerging and re-emerging diseases, environmental epidemiology, molecular biology, nutrition, and growth. Her primary expertise is in the development of analytical tools for spatiotemporal and longitudinal data analysis applied to disease surveillance, exposure assessment, and studies of growth; creation and application of statistical tools to evaluate the influence of an extreme and/or intermediate event on spatial and temporal patterns.
Eleanor Shonkoff
Associate Clinical Professor in the Division of Health Sciences and Nutrition at Merrimack College
Dr. Eleanor Shonkoff is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Division of Health Sciences and Nutrition at Merrimack College. She completed post-doctoral training at ChildObesity180 with the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and holds a Ph.D. in Preventive Medicine from the University of Southern California, an M.A. in Social Psychology from Wake Forest, and B.A.s in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the University of Georgia.
Dr. Shonkoff’s research focuses on the intersection of parent behavior, child diet and child obesity risk—especially in underserved communities facing food insecurity. Her community-based intervention work seeks to develop tools that address food insecurity using minimal/least invasive methods to achieve behavior change. She employs mixed methods to investigate links between parental stress, feeding practices and children’s diet & activity patterns. Her methodological work includes development of Artificial Intelligence approaches to address nutrition needs in real-world settings: such as digital image-based dietary assessment tools, applications for food insecure individuals in need of food access and nutrition education, and apps to aid food pantry staff in implementing behavioral economics approaches to improved nutrition in the charitable food sector. At Merrimack, she is also a co-founding member of the Food Justice Research & Action Cluster.
Peter Nadel
Digital Humanities Natural Language Processing Specialist in Research Technology in Tufts Technology Services
In this role, he helps faculty, students and staff to analyze large corpora of documents at scale. He has enabled several faculty members to understand their textual data from across many different departments on a variety of grants and projects. His personal research explores how artificial intelligence and large language models can be used to enable and facilitate classroom learning in several disciplines. He also studies how these tools work with under-resourced languages, which have been traditionally disregarded by natural language processing.
Dasha Agoulnik
Transforming Health Coaches into Root-Cause Leaders | 3 Brands Built | 7-Figure Coaching System Powered by Labs + AI
Dasha Agoulnik is a registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and 5x published nutrition researcher focused on optimizing gut, hormone, and metabolic health. She earned her Master’s in Nutritional Epidemiology from Tufts University’s Friedman School, where she won the $100K Pitch Competition for her patent-pending gut-friendly protein, CorePerform®. As the founder and CEO of CorePerform®, CoreCoaches.io, and CoreSystems.ai, Dasha bridges science and entrepreneurship—helping individuals and health professionals achieve better results through evidence-based nutrition, advanced lab testing, and AI-powered systems. She also served on the U.S. Food and Innovation Council, collaborating with leaders from Kellogg, Campbell, and Nestlé to shape the future of functional nutrition.
2:30 – 2:45 pm — Break
2:45 – 4:00 pm — Hands-On Data Experience (Tufts Data Lab)
Speaker(s): Kyle Monahan, Uku-Kaspar Uustalu
Kyle Monahan
Part-time Lecturer, Gordon Institute; Manager, Data Science Services, Tufts University
Kyle has a background in environmental science and engineering, with a specific focus on geochemical techniques applied to water. His previous work includes developing sediment contaminant chronologies for the Hudson River at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), and work in developing low-cost filters with arsenic adsorbents at Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY). His most recent graduate work at Tufts University used agent-based models to investigate the role of social and behavioral factors on the feasibility of point-of-use water technologies.