Maya Vadiveloo, PhD, RD, FAHA, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of Rhode Island. She is a registered dietitian, nutritional epidemiologist, and behavioral scientist who studies the environmental and behavioral determinants of food choice, and how they can be modified to improve diet quality and cardiovascular health.

Her work starts from the premise that healthy eating is usually treated as a matter of individual willpower, when most of what people eat is shaped by what is available, affordable, and convenient where they shop. She designs and evaluates interventions that act on those conditions — financial incentives for fruits and vegetables, personalized recommendations delivered through mobile apps, changes to the retail food environment — and develops the measurement tools needed to tell whether they are working. Recent work includes evaluating the first statewide fresh produce incentive for SNAP participants in the United States, and chairing the American Heart Association’s 2025 Science Advisory on ultra-processed foods and cardiometabolic health.

Research in the Big Data and Eating Decisions (Byte) Lab draws on epidemiological analysis of large population and purchasing datasets, randomized trials, qualitative and mixed methods, machine learning, and implementation science

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-2015) – Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Nutrition, NIH Ruth L Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Ph.D. (2008-2013) – New York University, Nutrition, Concentration: Nutritional Epideimology, Dissertation: A novel scoring method to evaluate associations between dietary variety and body adiposity in a national sample of U.S. adults
• M.S. (2005-2008) – Boston University, Nutrition and Dietetics
• B.A. (2002-2005) – Brown University, Human Biology, Graduated Magna cum Laude and with honors