Pizza & Prof Speaker Lorraine Cordeiro Describes Her Nontraditional Journey into Academia

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On the evening of March 23, Lorraine Cordeiro, director of the Center for Research on Families and associate professor in Nutrition, huddled together with students and faculty in the Honors Hub to host her Pizza & Prof night, where she described her nontraditional research pathway.

After being introduced by associate dean Ann Marie Russell, Cordeiro started the evening off by giving each member of the gathering a piece of paper containing a motivational quote, with the hope that these notes will “inspire or speak to” the audience. She then asked each person to introduce themselves and to explain what the quote meant to them. 

Students and faculty drew on their own personal experiences at this segment. Dean Mari Castañeda was the first one to go, and her quote said “You are doing great.” She explained how this related to her: “Oftentimes, there's so much going on that we feel like we're not doing great, so this is a really sweet reminder.”

After everyone had their turn to speak, Cordeiro explained the importance of this exercise to her: “Each one of you is actually a part of me and it's almost stunning to hear all of that,” she said.

Following this, Cordeiro explained that she wanted to do this Pizza & Prof to interact with students on a one-on-one basis in an informal setting. She then proceeded to describe her journey. 

“I'm Lorraine Cordeiro, I was the only girl on the soccer field with 40 boys growing up. I ran barefoot, because I hated shoes,” she began. 

Cordeiro grew up in Tanzania, and due to economic and political insecurity, she and her family moved to the U.S., where she majored in biology at Mount Holyoke College. 

As a first-generation student, Cordeiro felt the pressures of adjusting to America, which took a toll on her academics. “My students always say, ‘Oh, you went from zero to PhD.” Her first advisor told her that a major in biology wasn’t possible, but she didn’t give up and talked to another advisor to build the major herself.

"I knew early on that there was going to be a lot of ‘No’s’ in my life — and I just figured that was normal — but that wasn't going to stop me from getting to where I needed to get."

Cordeiro then got her Master's in Public Health from Tulane University. She “loved public health” and it was “everything to her.” During her time there, she was exposed to the devastating state of poverty in Louisiana. 

“I wondered, how can we let people live like that? How could we live with this privilege when we know so many people are getting left behind? And that really brought food security to the forefront for me, which is the human right that every one of us has to be nourished, to have food,” she explained

Cordeiro came back to Massachusetts to work in this field. She initially worked in domestic violence for a long time, but quit her job after she was burning out and found it difficult. She wanted to work with adolescents, so she took a lower-paying job at a youth center in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she started out with 20 kids, and after a year and a half, she was working with over 400 children. 

Working with adolescents inspired her to get her PhD: “I wanted to learn about food security and figure out what we need to research to create impactful evidence-based programs. And with that, I took my PhD and went back home to Tanzania.”

During her time in Tanzania, she hired adolescents to collect data for her, and described them as the “best research team she’s ever had.” They went to 20 different villages and sourced information from 54 different ethnic groups.

All this work brought her to UMass Amherst:

"I wanted to open the door on the other side for kids who need the opportunity to be able to excel, and then they’ll open the door for others."

Cordeiro’s research focuses on food insecurity and traditional medicine. She credits Black and Indigenous women for paving the path for her and is working on a study in the Dominican Republic, where she’s using “urban gardening” to help decrease food insecurity for HIV-positive people. With the maximum benefits from their food intake, they can increase the effectiveness of their medicines, which would reduce the HIV viral load and its transmission.

Her other study is in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she’s working with low-income mothers from underrepresented demographics who are struggling with food insecurity. At this point, she asked the participants to split up into pairs and answer one question: “If you had $15K, how would you help these women get out of poverty?”

The pairs came up with numerous ideas, including access to affordable childcare, educational assistance for the mother, and increasing food pantry resources.

“These stories matter a lot to me in the context of how I do my research and how I am as a professor, because I'm just lucky to be here. Some of us don't have the same pathways. It's not the same for all of our ancestors. They have very different pathways to get to what we've got,” she added. She also emphasized the importance of acknowledging the poverty around us and how we can collectively come together to address it, and that we need to help people "who can barely scrape by." 

After this discussion, Cordeiro then concluded her talk: "I love what I do right now; I hated being a professor earlier, its so performance-based, but this is the probably the best stage of my career. I have so much fun with my research and I love what students are doing. I'm amazed by the Honors College—you are all so brilliant and it gives me so much hope for what the world could look like."

The gathering then split up to talk to Cordeiro on a one-on-one basis. Carol Liu, a senior operations & information management major who attended the event said “I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to listen to her, and I’m glad I did so.”

“I’m interested in nutrition and it's so inspiring to hear Professor Cordeiro’s life story and how she helps others now,” she added.