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Primary faculty

Yuru Huang

Assistant Professor

MHS, PhD

Additional info:

Yuru Huang studies how food environments and nutrition policies shape population diets and health. Her work seeks to understand how food environments can be measured, how online platforms such as meal delivery apps personalize what individual users see, and how interventions and policies can be designed and evaluated to promote healthier diets.

Huang applies data science to measure food environments at scale. For example, she has used web scraping to build a longitudinal restaurant nutrition database, Google Street View images to develop neighborhood level indicators, and computer vision pipelines to automate retail food environment assessments. She also uses randomized trials and natural experiments to study nutrition policies, including front-of-package nutrition labeling and healthy checkout policies. Her current work focuses on meal delivery apps, including how recommendation algorithms shape what users see and how these systems might be redesigned to promote health.

Before joining WashU, Huang was an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She earned her PhD in medical science from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and her MHS in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis, and previously spent nearly four years as a data scientist (staff fellow) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, where she worked on federal nutrition policy.

Areas of Focus:

  • Digital food environments
  • Food and nutrition policy
  • Dietary public health
  • Big data applications in nutrition
  • Food systems

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