Janet Leader

Janet Leader, MPH, RD, is a Lecturer and the Associate Director of Field Studies in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She has extensive experience in directing public health nutrition programs, especially for vulnerable populations; mentoring and educating future public health and dietetics practitioners; and directing public health research projects.  Most recently, she developed and pilot tested a teaching kitchen study, with the focus on nutrition and preparing healthy foods, for health professional students at UCLA. While the Director of Services at Second Harvest Food Bank in Santa Clara County, she served as a preceptor for medical students in the Stanford School of Medicine Population Health Community Project. In addition, she collaborated with the Stanford Prevention Research Program to develop a medical school course to train multi-lingual Health Ambassadors to work at the food bank.  She directed the nutrition education project at Second Harvest Food Bank, focused on changing nutrition behaviors of over 50,000 food bank clients through a USDA SNAP-Ed grant and provided consultation to the national Feeding America organization.   As Project Director at the Stanford School of Medicine, she directed a pilot nutrition and physical activity intervention to reduce child obesity. Ms. Leader was the Director of the six-county Bay Area Nutrition and Physical Activity Collaborative of community partners working to address health inequities and policies in the Bay Area. In Seattle, she directed the dietetics internship program at the University of Washington. Prior to that, she developed the first dietetic internship program at Sea Mar Community Health Center in Seattle to offer opportunities for Spanish-speaking nutrition students to serve the Latino community. She also worked in cancer prevention at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the American Cancer Society.  In addition, Ms. Leader taught health and nutrition as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon.