Erin O’Dwyer is a doctoral student in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on public health impacts of agroecology, food sovereignty, and regenerative agriculture as well as multi-level approaches to sustainable, equitable food system transitions. Erin has participated in Harvard’s Climate Living Lab, was an inaugural Climate Summer Fellow, and has actively worked with the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment to develop UN Food System Summit guidelines.
Prior to Harvard, Erin worked in nutrition counseling and completed her masters in clinical nutrition at The National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR where she gained experience in naturopathic principles including one that guides her work today: “patient as teacher, nature as healer.” She currently lives with her partner and adorable cat, Kitkat, and is obsessed with fashion design, sending hand-crafted snail mail, and latte-fueled weekend hikes.
Erin’s project focuses on understanding how U.S. family farmers develop land and community ethics, explaining how they use these in deciding to engage in agroecological (i.e., sustainable) practices, and exploring how experiences of climate change interact with their decision-making processes. As part of this work, she will document the lived experiences of family farmers in the Pacific Northwest through interviews and farm visits. She hopes this work might serve the community she is partnering with by informing future policymaking and advocacy efforts as well as contribute to collective efforts to transform food systems equitably and sustainably.