Lilian Cheung, RD, ScD

Dr. Cheung is a Lecturer, Director of Health Promotion & Communication, and Editorial Director of The Nutrition Source website (www.thenutritionsource.org) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition. Her work focuses on translating nutrition science into multimedia resources and community programs that help children, adults, and families lead healthier lives.

She has extensive experience working with the mass media to promote healthy lifestyles that prevent major chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. As the Director of Nutrition and Fitness at Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication, she spearheaded a collaboration with Nickelodeon Television to embed nutrition and fitness messages into the network’s prime-time programming from 1991 to 1996. To improve the quality of nutrition information for the public, she co-moderated with Jane Brody, New York Times health columnist, a series of forums for health editors of family and women’s magazines as well as broadcast and news executives from 1985 to 1992. Later, her research resulted in a successful school-based nutrition and physical activity program for upper elementary school children, Eat Well & Keep Moving,(www.eatwellandkeepmoving.org), that has reached across the U.S. and 18 countries.

Together with the late former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Julius Richmond, she co-hosted one of the earliest national conferences to address childhood obesity, and co-edited Child Health, Nutrition and Physical Activity(Human Kinetics,1995). She also teamed up with a well-known children’s writer, Mavis Jukes, to create a book for adolescent girls, Be Healthy! It’s A Girl Thing: Food, Fitness and Feeling Great! (Crown/Random House, 2003).

Dr. Cheung has been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh for more than a decade. She leads meditation groups and has helped establish ongoing mindfulness meditation sessions offered to all students, faculty and staff at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.