Jennifer Otten

Dr. Otten has experience as a researcher, teacher, communications director, and advocate. Her broad range of experience and expertise will allow her to speak from a different perspective from many researchers and to incorporate a policy lens. Her focus is not only on food and nutrition, but how upstream factors such as government policies, employment, wage, and other factors contribute to population health. Dr. Otten is also the co-Founder and co-Director of UW’s Livable City Year, a year-long city-academic partnership that pairs university faculty and students annually with a new city to advance the city’s goals for livability and sustainability. This initiative gives hers unique insights into the types of problems cities are currently grappling with, the solutions that might be viable, and the knowledge and partnerships needed to advance city goals.

At the University of Washington, Jennifer Otten is an Associate Professor in Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, core faculty in Nutritional Sciences, and co-leads the Center for Public Health Nutrition. Dr. Otten received her BS in Nutritional Sciences from Texas A&M University, her MS in Nutrition Communications from Tufts University, her PhD in Animal, Nutrition, and Food Sciences from the University of Vermont, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Otten’s research is focused on the impacts of public health, nutrition, and food policies and the policy process on health behaviors and health outcomes; food systems, as they relate to food and nutrition policy; and understanding and improving the ways in which research gets to the public policy table. Her current research is exploring the effects of wage on the culture of health in early childhood education centers.

[Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.]