Jennifer Orlet Fisher, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and associate director of Temple’s Center for Obesity Research and Education, is adding to her portfolio to become an associate editor of the journal Frontiers in Public Health. 

Fisher, whose work focuses on the development of eating behavior during infancy and early childhood, will oversee peer review for articles in the journal’s new Public Health and Nutrition section and help the publication build a collection of manuscripts that focus on population-level nutrition.

“I’m most excited about the fact that it's a new section of this journal, devoted to public health nutrition, which is a relatively new field in nutrition,” Fisher says. “It’s a field that uses applied perspectives to design programs, systems, policies and environments for addressing population-level nutritional issues and reducing disparities in at risk populations.”

Frontiers in Public Health is a multidisciplinary open-access journal that publishes online. Fisher also has served as co-executive editor at Appetite, a scholarly journal dedicated to the study of ingestive behavior, and has been on the editorial board of Nutrition Reviews.

Fisher has served as co-chair of the national Healthy Eating Research (HER) panel, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that is developing scientific guidelines to encourage healthy eating behaviors among children ages two to eight. The Obesity Society also honored Fisher with its Oded Bar-Or Award, a lifetime achievement accolade recognizing significant contributions to pediatric obesity research.

“It’s serendipitous that this comes at a time when the College of Public Health is launching its new master of public health in nutrition/registered dietician nutrition program, which is one of the few in the country to have a public health nutrition focus, specifically on urban populations,” Fisher says. “We currently have a number of nutrition courses at Temple, but offering an accredited graduate program brings new attention and training opportunities to this important area of public health.”