Faculty Profile for Dr. Cassandra Maria Johnson

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Cassandra M. Johnson, PhD, MSPH, serves as an Assistant Professor in the Nutrition and Foods Program at Texas State University.

Dr. Johnson serves as Co-PI and Nutrition Lead for Nutrition for Underserved Elders Via Application (or the NUEVA Project), a HHS/ACL-funded research project that leverages digital and technological approaches to build capacity for senior nutrition programs in Central Texas, and as Co-PI for Nutrition Leaders, a USDA-funded learning community to train the next generation of community and public health nutrition professionals. She maintains active collaborations with past projects, including the (1) USDA-funded Proyecto Mejorando la Esperanza en la Seguridad Alimentaria (MESA, Improving Hope for Food Security), a cognitive interviewing study to improve food insecurity measurement for Latino households with children, and (2) USDA-funded Salud para Usted y Su Familia (SPUSF, Health for You and Your Family) Project with the Haz Espacio para Papi (HEPP, Make Room for Daddy) behavioral intervention for Latino families living in U.S.-Mexico border communities.

Dr. Johnson’s research interests center on achieving equity in nutrition for historically socioeconomically disadvantaged populations through policies, systems, and environmental changes, including measurement and intervention approaches for rural communities, family systems, and older adults. Her research is interdisciplinary with theories and methods from public health and sociology. Dr. Johnson teaches courses in nutrition policy and research methods. She is involved with the International Society of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (ISBNPA) and Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM).

Research publications are available at Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9pS6dhUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra.

In 2017, she earned a Ph.D. in nutrition with a focus on intervention and policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health with a minor in epidemiology. Her doctoral training focused on family-centered approaches to address diet-related chronic diseases and community-engaged and mixed methods research in public health nutrition and sociology. In 2010, she completed the M.S.P.H. program at Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health in social and behavioral health. Her predoctoral training focused on food access and food insecurity for rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, including communities in Southeast Texas and colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas. Her team developed new methodological approaches to understand nutrition disparities with mixed methods, participatory visual methods, including participant-driven photo-elicitation (PDPE), and promotora/e models. Prior to transitioning to public health nutrition, Dr. Johnson studied industrial and systems engineering and worked as a consultant engineer.

Teaching Interests

Nutrition policy; research methods; writing.

Research Interests

Socioeconomic inequalities in nutrition; food access; food (in)security; food choices; behavioral nutrition interventions and programs; rural health; parental and maternal child nutrition; family systems; community based participatory research; promotor/a de salud models; research methodology, including theory and measurement; digi-tech approaches in nutrition assessment and intervention (Veggie Meter, mhealth).