Emma C. Lewis, Ph.D., M.S., is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Healthy Living Program within the Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health through Agriculture, IHA, where she works with Rebecca A. Seguin-Fowler, Ph.D., and her team at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Dallas.
Lewis’s research applies a whole systems approach to developing and evaluating multilevel, community-embedded interventions to prevent diet-related chronic disease, with a focus on improving dietary behaviors, physical activity and environmental determinants of health in underserved and rural populations. She contributes to NIH- and USDA-funded projects advancing healthy food access, community health promotion and intervention delivery, including Deep in the Heart for Women, an NIH R01-funded lifestyle intervention for rural women in South Texas in partnership with the Coastal Bend Health Education Center; The Neighborhood and Health Study, an IHA-funded naturalistic study of agriculturally-integrated neighborhoods (“agrihoods”) in Greater Houston led through the Texas A&M School of Public Health and Baylor University; and the USDA-funded Nutrition Hub at Texas A&M, supporting statewide coordination of nutrition education and outreach with Cooperative Extension. She also contributes to Change Club civic engagement interventions to promote policy, systems and environmental change in rural communities, including an implementation evaluation with researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, and supports the development of digital tools to enhance intervention delivery and translation into practice. She is interested in extending this work to cancer prevention, measurement science and simulation modeling, with a focus on scalable strategies to reduce cancer risk in real-world community settings.
Lewis received her Ph.D. in Public Health Nutrition from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was supported by an NIH T32 Predoctoral Clinical Research Training Grant from 2020–2024. Her doctoral research focused on improving access to healthy foods in Baltimore through the development of the Baltimore Urban Food Distribution, BUD, App, a digital platform designed to strengthen urban food distribution networks. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Anthropology and a Master of Science in Behavioral Health Psychology, both from Tulane University. Lewis has contributed to a broad body of dissemination and scholarly work; for a full list of publications, visit her NCBI bibliography, Google Scholar or ORCiD, and connect with her on LinkedIn.