Faculty Profile for Dr. Cassandra Maria Johnson

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Cassandra M. Johnson, PhD, MSPH, serves as an Associate Professor in the Nutrition and Foods Program.

Dr. Johnson is Co-PI and Nutrition Lead for Nutrition for the Underserved Elders Via Application (or the NUEVA Project), an HHS/ACL-funded research project that leverages digital and technological approaches to build capacity for senior nutrition programs in Central Texas, and 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 research 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, and (3) USDA-funded Voices into Action: The Families, Food, and Health Project, a longitudinal and mixed-methods project focused on the family food environment for rural and urban communities of North Carolina.

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, behavioral nutrition, 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).

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 mixed methods research for capacity building. In 2010, she completed the M.S.P.H. program at Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health in social and behavioral health. Dr. Johnson's predoctoral training focused on food access and food (in)security for rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, including communities in Southeast Texas and colonias of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her team developed new methodological approaches to understand nutrition disparities with research methods like ground-truthing and participant-driven photo-elicitation (PDPE) with promotora 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/programs; rural health; parental and maternal child nutrition; family systems; community based participatory research; promotora de salud model; research methodology, including theory and measurement; digi-tech approaches in nutrition assessment and intervention (e.g., Veggie Meter, apps for mhealth).