Dr. Mahsa Jessri

Dr. Mahsa Jessri is Faculty at the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, Assistant Professor of Food, Nutrition and Health in the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems, and an Associate Member in the Division of Health Services and Policy at the UBC School of Population and Public Health. She is Principal Investigator of the Nutritional Epidemiology for Population Health Lab in the Food, Nutrition and Health Program, where she holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Nutritional Epidemiology for Population Health. She is a core member of Health Canada’s Nutrition Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) and recipient of the Royal Society of Canada Award.

Dr. Jessri is an expert in public health, nutritional epidemiology, surveillance and methodology, biostatistics, as well as public health nutrition policy and her program is uniquely at the intersection of population and public health and nutritional sciences and dietetics. The overarching goal of her research program is to provide the evidence-base and decision tools to inform national guidelines and policies for reducing the burden of chronic diseases.

Currently, Dr. Jessri’s program is focused on population modeling of the impact of lifestyle patterns on health and healthcare system, predictive modelling, population health impact assessment of public health nutrition policies, nutritional monitoring and surveillance, development of robust methods for addressing the challenges in assessment and analysis of complex data, and design and implementation of personalized risk assessment tools (web-based applications available through https://www.projectbiglife.ca/). She has published government reports and has been awarded several national grants to support her research program, including a recently-funded Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant to support her Nutritional Epidemiology and Big Data Analytics Laboratory.

Education
PhD (Vanier Scholar), Nutritional Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
MSc, Nutrition and Metabolism, Human Nutrition Division, University of Alberta

Research Interests
Development and validation of predictive risk tools and microsimulation models to support public health planning
Population health impact assessment of public health policies and lifestyle patterns
Measuring current and future burden of disease
Exploring machine learning techniques for deriving patterns in health data
Knowledge translation and evaluation (web-based application development and evaluation)

Affiliations and Awards
Discovery Award, Banting Research Foundation
Royal Society of Canada (RCS) Alice Wilson Award
Member, UBC Social Exposome Cluster

Current Graduate Students
Sappho Gilbert, PhD Student (Yale Fox Fellow)
Saba Jalali, PhD Student
Adelia Jacobs, MSc Student
Julia Chen, MSc Student
Alisha Buttar, MSc Student
Svilena Lazarova, MSc Student
Currently Recruiting Graduate Students Interested in
Development and validation of predictive risk tools and microsimulation models
Population health impact assessment
Measuring burden of disease
Using machine learning techniques
Knowledge translation and evaluation

Courses Currently Taught
FNH 398 Research Methods in Human Nutrition