Meredith T. Niles, PhD

Dr. Meredith Niles is the Robert L. Bickford Endowed Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont where she also teaches and advises in the Food Systems Program and the Data Science and Complex Systems Program.  She completed her BA in politics with honors in environmental studies at The Catholic University of America, a PhD in Ecology at the University of California at Davis and was a post-doctorate fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.  

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Meredith thrives conducting applied research that can help bring together diverse stakeholders- whether on a farm or working with policymakers- to help solve pressing problems facing our world's food system. Meredith is an interdisciplinary food systems scientist whose research focuses on advancing efforts to achieve sustainable food security and improve health, environmental, and rural livelihood outcomes in food systems, including in two key areas:

 

1) Farmer Decision-Making and Sustainable Production: Her long-standing research focuses on understanding the barriers and drivers for farmers to adopt more sustainable management practices to facilitate food security and improved health, environmental, and livelihood outcomes.  This work has examined farmer’s adoption of practices related to climate mitigation and adaptation, water management, nutrient management, integrated crop and livestock systems, manure management and other livestock management, and cover crop adoption as well as carbon markets and payment for ecosystem services.

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2) Improving Food and Health Outcomes during Crises and Change:  Global health (e.g. COVID-19) and environmental crises (e.g. climate change), as well as local crises including opioid use disorder and cancer diagnoses, have and will profoundly impact food and nutritional security. Meredith was the director and one of the founders of the National Food Access and COVID research Team (NFACT), and has studied the effect of climate change on diet and food security globally. This work has involved mixed methods ranging from interviews to global scale models and integration of social and ecological data, exploring how food and nutritional security and health outcomes are affected during crises.  This work has almost exclusively focused on marginalized communities, especially low income, rural communities

 

She utilizes multiple methodological approaches, primarily quantitative, and integrates social and ecological datasets for richer understanding of complex social-ecological system challenges. Currently she has a number of ongoing research projects related to food systems, health and environment from the perspective of people, behavior and policy.

 

Prior to her academic career, Meredith worked for the United States Department of State in HIV/AIDS public health and for several non-profit organizations.  She has also worked in various consulting projects for farmer organizations, the food industry, and non-profit groups, and government agencies, including most recently an assessment of climate change and nutrition, as well as on the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities Program at the US Department of Agriculture.

 

Meredith is a passionate advocate for open access research to make research more publicly available to maximize the potential of science and its benefits for society. To help realize this goal she served on the Board of Directors for the Public Library of Science (PLOS), one of the world's largest non-profit open access publishers, from 2014-2022.

 

Meredith has received notable honors including as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine Scholar with the National Academy of Medicine (2022-2025), as well as the Vogelmann Research Award in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UVM (2024), the Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (2010), Board Member of the Year from the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (2013), and the Next Generation Leadership Award from the Right to Research Coalition.