Karina Díaz Rios

Karina Díaz Rios

Karina Diaz Rios, PhD, RDN (Merced, CA) is a community nutrition researcher and a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist. She specializes in culturally and contextually responsive nutrition education to improve food environments and feeding practices. Her work is informed by the socioecological determinants of nutritional health. She applies implementation science principles to identify strategies that increase access to nutrition education in medically underserved communities. Her instrumentation work consists of devising methodological approaches to validate evaluation tools for linguistic and cultural relevance. She has contributed to the production of valid tools to measure the food environment at home, food-related parenting practices, and diet quality. Her work helps document the impact of nutrition education programs at the local, state, and national levels. She has also contributed to evincing the scarcity of quality clinical nutrition research focused on racial and ethnic minorities and co-authored a report that provides guidelines to improve the quality of publications that report race and ethnicity data. Dr. Díaz Rios obtained her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign after completing a Bachelor’s in Dietetics and a Master’s in Medical Sciences at the University of Guanajuato in México.