As the first women in my family to pursue a PhD in STEM, I will discuss successful strategies that have led to distinguished scholarship, innovative teaching and high-visibility professional service. I have carved a niche as a South Asian woman in this field and leveraged my background to expand on global issues at New York University. I will also discuss my leadership journey to Associate Vice Provost. In addition, I will discuss how I maintained work-life balance through the tenure and promotion process and through my leadership positions. 

Dr. Niyati Parekh is Professor of Public Health Nutrition and Associate Vice Provost of Faculty Initiative at NYU.  Dr. Parekh received her PhD in Nutritional Sciences with a minor in Population Health Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). 

Dr. Parekh has developed a research program with three interconnected areas that are unified under the theme of investigating diet and non-communicable diseases in populations, using epidemiologic methods. The first arm consists of leveraging existing data to identify dietary patterns, dietary quality and food consumption patterns in populations of interest. The second is to identify dietary determinants and biomarkers that predict disease outcomes including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. The third arm is to measure diets using novel dietary assessment methods that will contribute to more accurate and multi-dimensional measurement of diet.  An author of 80 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Parekh has received external grant awards from the American Cancer Society and NIH to support her research work. 

Her recent honors include being inducted as a New York Academy of Medicine Fellow, and her appointment as Independent Consultant at UNICEF. She has served the American Society for Nutrition as Chair of the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Group. She teaches graduate courses in the New York Campus and at study abroad sites (Mexico, Abu Dhabi and Florence). Graduate courses taught include Global Nutrition, Nutritional Epidemiology, Perspectives in Public Health and Global Cancer Epidemiology for which she has received awards. Dr. Parekh has served as the Executive Director of Doctoral Programs at GPH since 2017-2021. In this role, she supported about 30 PhD students, and promotes all aspects of their rigorous research and professional development towards impactful careers. She was appointed as Associate Vice Provost in Fall 2021 and will be leading the launch of the Early Career Faculty Institute, a mentoring program for tenure-track faculty in their first three years of appointment. Her vitae: CV