Editorial Board Nutrition & Digital Health Experts
Journal of Nutrition Research · Volume 3, 2026
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Sarah Mitchell, PhD, RD
Editor-in-Chief
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
Dr. Mitchell is Professor of Nutritional Epidemiology and Director of the Digital Dietary Assessment Laboratory at Harvard School of Public Health.
Her research focuses on the development and validation of digital dietary assessment methods, including mobile food tracking applications and
AI-assisted nutritional surveillance. She has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles and serves on the dietary assessment working groups
of the American Society for Nutrition and the International Union of Nutritional Sciences. She holds a PhD in Nutritional Epidemiology from
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and completed postdoctoral training at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge.
Associate Editors
Dr. James Okafor, PhD
Associate Editor Digital Health & mHealth Research
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Dr. Okafor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford and leads the mHealth Nutrition Engineering Lab.
His research investigates mobile health application design, behavioral engagement, and AI coaching systems for dietary behavior change.
He previously held a research position at Google Health and received his PhD in Health Informatics from the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Okafor serves on the IEEE Digital Health Technical Committee.
Prof. Elena Vasquez, MD, PhD, RD
Associate Editor Clinical Dietetics & Metabolic Research
University College London (UCL), London, UK
Prof. Vasquez holds the Chair in Clinical Nutrition at UCL and is Honorary Consultant Dietitian at University College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Her research focuses on clinical dietary interventions for metabolic disease, gut microbiome modulation through diet, and the integration of
digital nutrition assessment in clinical dietetics practice. She is Past President of the British Dietetic Association Research Forum and
associate editor of the Clinical Nutrition journal. She completed her MD and PhD at the University of Barcelona.
Dr. Wei Zhang, PhD
Associate Editor Computational Nutrition
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA
Dr. Zhang is Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where he leads the
Food Computing research group. His technical work focuses on deep learning architectures for food image recognition, portion size estimation
from monocular images, and large-scale nutritional database construction. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Tsinghua University
and completed postdoctoral training at MIT. He holds 12 patents in food recognition AI and has co-authored the widely-cited Food-101+
benchmark dataset.
Dr. Priya Nair, PhD, MPH
Associate Editor Behavioral Nutrition & Weight Management
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
Dr. Nair is Associate Professor of Behavioral Health and Nutrition in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health. Her research examines psychological mechanisms of dietary self-monitoring, adherence to calorie tracking interventions,
and behavioral determinants of weight management outcomes. She is principal investigator on three NIH-funded trials examining digital
self-monitoring for weight loss and metabolic health. She holds a PhD in Health Behavior and an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan.
Statistical Advisory Panel
The journal's statistical advisory panel provides methodological review for studies involving complex analytical methods:
- Prof. Yuki Tanaka Biostatistics, Kyoto University School of Public Health
- Dr. Marcus Petersen Meta-analytic Methods, Karolinska Institutet
- Dr. Amara Diallo Computational Epidemiology, Institut Pasteur
Editorial Policies
All editorial board members declare any competing interests annually. Members recuse themselves from editorial decisions on manuscripts where they have a direct financial, professional, or personal conflict of interest. The journal does not accept advertising from commercial nutrition technology companies. Board members may not serve as authors on manuscripts for which they are the handling editor.
Expressions of interest in joining the editorial board should be directed to the Editor-in-Chief at editorial@jnr-journal.org.