Niyati Parekh

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Professor of Public Health Nutrition

Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Initiatives and Global Engagement, Office of the Provost

Dr. Niyati Parekh’s research and teaching are motivated by a deep commitment to reduce nutrition-related disease outcomes in at-risk groups. In pursuit of this goal, as a nutritional epidemiologist, she has developed a robust research portfolio that examines the intersection of biological and behavioral factors of non-communicable diseases in US populations. The overarching theme of her research program is to examine the role of nutrition and diet-related factors in the etiology of non-communicable diseases, with a particular focus on obesity, metabolic dysregulation and cancer. Her multidisciplinary research integrates the intricacies from four distinct areas of expertise: disease biology, nutritional biochemistry, epidemiology and biostatistics. She has developed a research program with three interconnected areas that are unified under the theme of investigating diet and non-communicable diseases in populations, using epidemiologic methods. The first arm consists of leveraging existing data to identify dietary patterns, dietary quality and food consumption patterns in populations of interest. The second is to identify dietary determinants and biomarkers that predict disease outcomes including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. The third arm is to measure diets using novel dietary assessment methods that will contribute to more accurate and multi-dimensional measurement of diet. The three areas of her work complement each other and reveal preventive measures for populations, inform health policy and guide clinical practice. She has 75 peer-reviewed publications and her work has been supported by awards from the American Cancer Society and NIH.

Dr. Parekh holds an MS in Clinical Nutrition from Mumbai University and a PhD in Nutritional Sciences with a minor in Population Health Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). After completing a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Epidemiology at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey-Rutgers, she joined New York University Steinhardt’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health in January 2008. With doctoral and postdoctoral training in epidemiological methods, she cross-pollinated the fields of nutrition and public health. In 2015, as Associate Professor of Public Health Nutrition, she transitioned to NYU’s newly launched School of Global Public Health (GPH), as Director of the Public Health Nutrition program (until 2019). She also has an affiliated appointment at the Department of Population Health-Grossman School of Medicine.

Her recent honors include being inducted as a New York Academy of Medicine Fellow, and her appointment as Independent Consultant at UNICEF. She has served the American Society for Nutrition as Chair of the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Group. She teaches graduate courses in the New York Campus and at study abroad sites (Mexico, Abu Dhabi and Florence). Graduate courses taught include Global Nutrition, Nutritional Epidemiology, Perspectives in Public Health and Global Cancer Epidemiology for which she has received awards. Dr. Parekh has served as the Executive Director of Doctoral Programs at GPH since 2017. In this role, she supports about 30 PhD students, and promotes all aspects of their rigorous research and professional development towards impactful careers.

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Niyati Parek Research Timeline

Education

BS, Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Mumbai University, India

MS, Foods, Nutrition, and Clinical Dietetics, Mumbai University, India

PhD, Nutritional Sciences (minor Population Health Sciences), University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

Areas of research and study

Cancer

Chronic Diseases

Epidemiology

Nutrition

Obesity

Population Health

Public Health Nutrition

Publications

A Multi-Stage Dyadic Qualitative Analysis to Disentangle How Dietary Behaviors of Asian American Young Adults are Influenced by Family

Association between behavioural risk factors for hypertension and concordance with the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension dietary pattern among South Asians in the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study

Cardiovascular Health in the Transition From Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association

Concordance Between DASH Diet and Coronary Artery Calcification: Results From the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) Prospective Cohort Study

The role of ultra-processed food in obesity

Dietary patterns in the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study: comparisons across methodologies

Personal and Social-Built Environmental Factors of Glucose Variability Among Multiethnic Groups of Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: Research Protocol Using Ecological Momentary Assessment, Continuous Glucose Monitoring, and Actigraphy

Ultra-processed food intake among South Asians in the United States: Specific vulnerabilities of a growing immigrant population group

‘We know what he likes, even if he doesn’t know’: how the children of South Asian immigrants characterize and influence the diets of their parents

Concordance between Dash Diet and Hypertension: Results from the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) Study

Development of a Food List to Assess the Diet of South Asians Living in the U.S.: Preliminary Results From a Formative Study

Dietary Self-Management Using Mobile Health Technology for Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: A Scoping Review

Evaluating the healthfulness of Asian American young adult dietary behaviors and its association with family structure: Disaggregated results from NHIS 2015

Family Involvement in Asian American Health Interventions: A Scoping Review and Conceptual Model

Food Insecurity and Health Behaviors Among a Sample of Undergraduate Students at an Urban University

Identifying and Estimating Ultraprocessed Food Intake in the US NHANES According to the Nova Classification System of Food Processing

A need for diet assessment technology for South Asians living in the USA

A systematic review of randomized controlled trials examining workplace wellness interventions

Development of an Integrated Approach to Virtual Mind-Mapping: Methodology and Applied Experiences to Enhance Qualitative Health Research

Food Insecurity, Associated Health Behaviors, and Academic Performance Among Urban University Undergraduate Students

Mapping drivers of second-generation South Asian American eating behaviors using a novel integration of qualitative and social network analysis methods