A Look Into Social Epidemiology with 1998 Alumna

“As a social epidemiologist, I use existing data or collect new data to understand differences in health outcomes between segments of the population,” said Dr. Caspi. “Most of my work focuses on health and diet quality among low-income populations facing food insecurity in the United States. I collect both qualitative and quantitative data and also design studies to understand how policies, systems, and environments affect people’s health.”

Since 2020, Dr. Caspi has worked as an associate professor and the Director of Food Security Initiatives at Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut. She teaches a class titled Research Methods and advises students in the Health Promotion Sciences program. She noted that the class does a lot of work that is based in local communities, so it is a plus when students with Connecticut ties join the program. As part of the Health Promotion Sciences program, she became the doctoral advisor and mentor to Hamden Hall alumnus Curtis Antrum 2012, who recently graduated with this Ph.D., after defending his dissertation titled Understanding Multilevel Factors Associated with Food Insecurity and its Risks Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

“I was so proud to see him graduate; and a doctoral advisor and their doctoral student both being Hamden Hall alumni surely does not happen that often,” said Dr. Caspi.

Prior to the welcoming opportunity to return to her home state, Dr. Caspi worked at her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, for eight years where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. She had previously worked as a fellow in the University of Minnesota Cancer-related Health Disparities Education and Career Development program.

Dr. Caspi noted that one of her favorite aspects of her work is policy evaluation; particularly food policy and economic policy, noting that when a federal food policy change occurs, she researches and works to tell what effect it has on people’s health behaviors or health outcomes. Additionally, Dr. Caspi does quite a bit of work with the charitable food system, specifically food banks and food pantries, in an effort to improve the supply and demand for healthy food in that system.

Most recently, she completed a study funded by the National Institutes of Health that examined the effects of raising the minimum wage. She along with a group of fellow researchers followed a group of low-wage workers over five years to understand whether a minimum wage increase resulted in improved diet quality and health. Curtis worked alongside Dr. Caspi and his dissertation conducted some of the most interesting analyses from the study as he identified five distinct patterns of food insecurity among the workers over five years. As her work requires vast amounts of writing, she credited Hamden Hall for not being daunted with that task and noticed that same effort with Curtis.

Dr. Caspi graduated from Brown University in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology. She went on to obtain both her master’s degree and doctorate from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she studied social epidemiology. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota. She and her husband Elion currently live in West Hartford with their two daughters.