Amanda McClain

Amanda C. McClain, PhD (San Diego, CA) is an Associate Professor of Nutrition at San Diego State University. Her community-engaged mixed methods research employs health and social science perspectives to investigate how the stress of marginalization, especially food insecurity, shapes food choice and dietary intake and gets ‘under the skin’ to impact allostatic load and cardiometabolic risk among low-income and historically marginalized populations, particularly Hispanic/Latino communities. Simultaneously, her research aims to identify and leverage existing cultural, social, human, and material capacities (i.e., assets), as a part of structural and behavior-change interventions embedded in existing infrastructure (e.g., federally qualified health centers, food assistance programs), to mitigate the stress of marginalization and promote food security, nutritious diets, and cardiometabolic health equity. Dr. McClain earned her PhD from the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2016 – 2018). She is the Primary Investigator for research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and provides advisory and evaluation support for Project New Village, a BIPOC-led, grassroots nonprofit promoting food sovereignty in the historically marginalized area of Southeastern San Diego.