Our Work

Our Goals

The Jia Lab partners with community leaders, residents and organizations to create and integrate prevention programs tailored to local needs. Our approach brings together experts of lived experience, advocacy, social services and research to develop effective and useful solutions for promoting health in communities.

Community-Centered: We work side-by-side with communities to understand their unique challenges and strengths.
Holistic Approach: Our programs address the interconnected factors that influence health.
Evidence-Based: We use research to inform our work and measure its impact.

View our lab's publications

Current Projects

Community-engaged Design and Implementation of a Behavioral Economics Food Choice Intervention in Food Pantries to Improve Cardiovascular Health

Food insecurity raises the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). This behavioral study is focused on adapting, evaluating and piloting digital menu nudges to encourage healthy choices in online pantry clients and improve diet quality. This project will develop a new multi-component digital nudge intervention, Healthy Options At Pantries (HOAP) using a community-engaged codesign process to make it acceptable and feasible for pantry clients and staff. HOAP will be piloted in an online pantry to pretest and refine implementation. Afterwards, HOAP will be evaluated to learn how well it encourages clients to choose healthier groceries. Designing effective behavioral interventions that promote healthy food selection in online pantries has the potential to improve health among food insecure households.

Building Client Feedback Models for Food Pantries

Food pantries are an important source of community-based food assistance for food insecure families. This project uses community-engaged approaches to develop and pilot a brief 10-item client feedback tool acceptable to pantry guests and useful to food pantries. It will capture the priorities of food pantry clients while also being feasible and acceptable. Enabling a systematic feedback system to increase food pantry access, improve client experience and make food pantries more suitable for behavioral interventions can improve trust between food pantries and the communities they served.

Partner With Us

We're seeking charitable food organizations interested in:

Engaging with our food choice intervention project (must have an online ordering operation.)
Piloting our survey in the feedback tool project.