‘Tis the season for food, family, and friends – but isn’t it time for these year round? Health is not just an individual matter but a community matter and there are ways to affect this matter in your daily life. Join us for a talk with Rebecca Seguin on how individual and community action can positively impact our individual and collective health at any time of year.

“Creating a Healthier Community Environment Across Generations†
Featuring Rebecca Seguin, Assistant Professor, Division of Nutritional Sciences

Professor Seguin’s current research focuses on understanding how people’s social, food, and physical activity environments influence behavior over time—particularly in rural communities. She is also working on community mobilization and capacity building initiatives with health educators who serve rural areas. The goal is to provide training and evaluation tools to help them engage residents to become involved in programs and policies to improve their food and physical activity environments through collective action.

Her work has also focused on chronic disease prevention and public health. She is interested in behavioral theory, health communications, and the context in which people develop, change, and maintain health behaviors. In 2003, she co-developed a comprehensive curriculum and training program for implementing research-based programming for midlife and older women. To date, 3,000 health educators in 48 states have been trained to implement these community-based physical activity and nutrition programs in predominantly non-urban areas.  Read more here.

Professor Seguin earned a B.S. in Clinical Exercise Physiology at Boston University and began her career as an exercise physiologist, first working in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, and then developing individual and group programming for clients with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, HIV, and multiple sclerosis.  She later completed her M.S. in Nutrition Communications and Ph.D. in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition at Tufts University.

She currently is a Fellow, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (2015-2017) at Cornell.  She also is the Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow (2015-2016) at Cornell.