Kiyah Duffey, PhD candidate, was awarded a CDC Grant for Public Health Research Dissertation (R36) for her proposed research titled “You are where you eat: Longitudinal associations between the neighborhood food environment, away-from-home eating patterns, obesity and diabetes.”  

CDC’s R36 Dissertation Grants are designed to support and encourage doctoral candidates from a variety of academic disciplines and programs to conduct health-promotion and disease-prevention research that is in-line with the objectives of “Healthy People 2010”. The overarching goal of Ms. Duffey’s dissertation is to examine how the community food environment influences dietary patterns, consumption of away-from-home foods (restaurant and fast foods), obesity and diabetes risk over a 13-year period in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. This research will fill an important gap in understanding the long-term effect of the food environment and its influence on away-from-home eating and incident obesity and obesity related outcomes.