Dr. Niles is a Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health and a Professor of Environment and Society in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University (IBES). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on advancing efforts to achieve sustainable food security and improve health, environmental, and rural livelihood outcomes in food systems, especially with rural communities. Her primary areas of research explore improving food security, nutrition, and health outcomes during climate change and public health crises and increasing farmer’s adoption of sustainable agriculture practices to reduce environmental and public health impacts.
Dr. Niles has most recently spent the last decade at the University of Vermont (UVM), where she was the Green and Gold Robert L. Bickford Endowed Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and the Food Systems Program. During that time she also served as the Acting Director of the Gund Institute for Environment in 2023, and as the Associate Director of the Food Systems Research Center at UVM, a collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service from 2021-2023.
She has received notable honors for her work, most recently including as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine Fellow (2022-2025) from the National Academy of Medicine and the Hubert W. Vogelmann Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship from UVM in 2024.
Dr. Niles holds a B.A in political science with honors in environmental studies from The Catholic University of America and a PhD in ecology with a focus on sustainable agriculture and environmental policy from the University of California- Davis. She was a Giorgio Ruffolo Sustainability Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where her research focused on smallholder farmer food security impacts from climate change. Prior to her academic career Dr. Niles worked in public health at the United States Department of State on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and with several environmental and food system non-profit organizations. She has served as a consultant and advisor for several international and federal agencies and non-profit organizations including the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), US Agency for International Development, US Department of Agriculture, World Resources Institute, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. She is a passionate advocate for open scholarship, serving on the Board of Directors for the Public Library of Science (PLOS) from 2014-2022, and continuing to develop open scholarship policies and practices within and beyond academic institutions.
