Dr. Marissa McElrone began teaching at UTC in 2020. Photo by Angela Foster.
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, research is making a difference in labs, industry and even on your dining room table.
For UC Foundation Associate Professor Marissa McElrone, making a difference comes through how food gets on people’s tables. A faculty member in the Department of Health and Human Performance, McElrone brings experience from previous positions, including serving as a minority health promotion coordinator; a Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program nutritionist; a nutrition leadership trainee through the Maternal and Child Health Bureau; and a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania.
She also holds Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) and Certified in Public Health (CPH) credentials.
She is currently working on two projects focused on nutrition and food security, specifically federal nutrition assistance programs and emergency food systems.
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What are you working on with your two research projects?
“One is with data from a local food pantry. We’re looking at the relationship between home and food pantry environments and people’s attitudes towards fruits and vegetables. Their self-efficacy, such as actually cooking fruits and vegetables, and other barriers related to outcomes of nutrition security. Which is this concept of, ‘Do I have access to healthful food that promotes health for everyone in my household that meets my dietary preferences or my cultural preferences?’
“Another big project that I work on … I’m a contracted research scientist with a nonprofit called the Center of Nutrition and Health Impact. I work with them on a USDA-funded WIC modernization project. It’s a federal nutrition assistance program called the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
“It provides nutrition education as well as nutrition benefits that people can use at the grocery store or at farmers’ markets to support pregnant people, infants and children up to age 5, as well as breastfeeding postpartum. So that program’s been around for a long time and there’s been a lot of effort to really modernize it to increase accessibility for folks.
“The project I work on with them is that we have sub-grantees across the entire country that are really testing innovative strategies and different ways to try to increase participation, enrollment and awareness of the WIC program.”
Has health always been a passion for you?
“I’ve always been interested in health. I’m actually the youngest of 11 kids and a lot of my older brothers and sisters are in some avenue of health. One sister’s a physician. I have a physical therapy nurse in the family. One sister was in kinesiology, so lots of us have gravitated towards health.
“I wanted to do something in health from a young age. I grew up Catholic, and I gave up high fructose corn syrup for Lent one year, and my mom’s like, ‘OK, so we know where she’s probably headed.’ I loved chemistry and my high school chemistry teacher told me, ‘You love health, you like chemistry, nutrition is like this beautiful mix of those two things.’ So I went to Penn State, did my undergrad in nutritional sciences, and obviously, the dietetic side is really interesting.”
What specific areas within this research interest you?
“For a really long time, the field of public health nutrition was interested in this concept of food security, and it was more focused on whether people are getting enough food to support a healthy life. In the last five or so years, the public health nutrition field has really transitioned; we still understand that food security is important, but there’s this extension that we call nutrition security that’s really about, ‘Are people getting health-promoting food?’
“I’m super interested in understanding more about that concept of the populations that I work with and how we can start moving the needle while also addressing food security. But really getting at that health component that goes beyond getting people enough food.”
For students interested in your research or the health field, how would you encourage them to pursue that path?
“There’s a ton of different disciplines that can get at this problem and address it from different lenses, so go into fields like sociology, anthropology and public health—and even some of the health sciences like exercise and health science. Focus more on the community applied pieces, which can get you exposure to working with the community and understanding what’s going on and realizing that you need multiple perspectives at the table to address issues like this because it’s not just one discipline.”
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UTC Department of Health and Human Performance
