Ms. Christine Porter

A pregnant woman in Mali faces a 12% chance of dying in childbirth. Her child's chances in his or her first year of life are no better. The respective maternal and infant mortality risks in the US are 0.02% and 0.7%. Within the US, African-American women are twice as likely as white women to die giving birth. Month-old babies born in the poorest 20% of counties are more than twice as likely to die by their first birthday as those in the richest. Even those born in the middle income quintile are 60% more likely to die than those in the wealthiest.

In the education and public health nutrition fields, I am working to organize social change that addresses the underlying causes of these kinds of gross inequities, in however small or indirect a way. I am particularly interested in community-based participatory action research (CBPR) approaches to such change, and in health promotion ethics and values more generally.

In that vein, I am locally involved in the "Whole Community Project" (WCP) that works to ensure every child in Tompkins County, New York has all the healthy food they need and plenty of opportunities for safe, fun and active play. My efforts in this project include stepping up mobilization for food justice in the County and anti-racism work.

My dissertation examines the WCP and several other community projects working to prevent childhood obesity as well as the support and national context provided by organizations such as the CDC, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute of Medicine. In addition to informing childhood obesity prevention in its own right, I am using this work as an empirical example for illustrating and grounding a values-founded framework and philosophy for health promotion.

From 2006-2008, I served on the internal review board of Anthropology and Education Quarterly. In my first two years at Cornell, I was a PhD student in Adult and Extension Education. Having finished that coursework, I moved to nutrition hoping to work more effectively as a public health "insider".

From 2005-2008, I consulted on program evaluations, web navigation and content, and learning design. I've been involved in redrafting curriculum materials for parents about preventing childhood obesity, creating an online course applying ecological approaches to such prevention, and designing web accessibilty training .