About
Ramya Ambikapathi is a Senior Research Associate in the Cornell CALS Department of Global Development. Her research broadly focuses on how environmental and ecological factors translate to poor nutrition outcomes, and efforts to mitigate these negative impacts. This research has led her to explore gender equity, men’s engagement, family food choices, food environment, informal economy, food systems, and consequently, metrics and methods to measure these complex factors as they relate to nutrition outcomes.
Before joining Cornell, Ramya was a Research Scientist at the Department of Public Health at Purdue University. Ramya completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Chan and Purdue University working on two cluster randomized control trials in Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has led the “DECIDE study," a Drivers of Food Choice grant exploring family food environments, family diets, and informal food environments in urban Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Research
Ramya's research vision and approaches are grounded in epidemiology and planetary health, which encompasses both the health of human societies and natural systems. Because of rapidly transitioning food systems and the variable effects of climate change, there is a need for innovative, multiple-methods approaches in researching and evaluating this impact on human nutrition. Therefore, she commonly employs mixed-methods study designs using quantitative methods such as spatial statistics, latent-class modeling, factor analysis, longitudinal analysis, and qualitative methods such as direct observations, interviews, pile-sorting, and more recently, tele-group interviews and qualitative evidence synthesis to study disparities in nutrition outcomes.
