Mariana Chilton

Mariana Chilton

Professor of Practice

Food security, trauma, human rights, advocacy, maternal & child health

Location

Arnold House

715 North Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01003
United States

411 Arnold House

Links

Mariana Chilton, PhD, MPH, is a school-wide Professor of Practice with a faculty home in the Department of Nutrition.  Dr. Chilton authored The Painful Truth About Hunger in America Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again (MIT Press, October 2024).

Before joining UMass, Dr. Chilton carried out research and programming on food security, trauma, and economic empowerment with mothers of young children. She founded and directed the award-winning Center for Hunger-Free Communities which developed solutions to hunger and economic insecurity. During this time, she launched Witnesses to Hunger, a movement to increase women's participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty, founded and directed the Building Wealth and Heath Network to incentivize entrepreneurship and build family wealth, and served as principal investigator for the Philadelphia site of Children's HealthWatch, a research network devoted to improving health and well-being of young children and their caregivers.

Dr. Chilton served as the Co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger meant to advise Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture on how to improve anti-poverty programs. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and served as advisor to Sesame Street and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Chilton’s work has been covered in the feature-length documentary A Place at the Table, and in the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, public radio, and CBS National News.

Education

  • PhD, University of Pennsylvania
  • MPH, University of Oklahoma
  • MA, University of Pennsylvania
  • AB, Harvard University

Key Publications

Correa-Salazar C, Marín-Carvajal I, García MA, Fox K, Chilton MM. Earth Rights for the Advancement of a Planetary Health Agenda. Health Education & Behavior. 2024;51(6):787-795. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981241232642

Lê-Scherban F, Wang A, Courts KA, Ettinger de Cuba S, Wade R Jr, Chilton MM. A Short Adverse Experiences Measure Among Mothers of Young Children. Pediatrics. 2024 Apr 1;153(4):e2023063882. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38449423/

Chilton, MM. Sacred Nutrition: Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty and Rights of Women and Nature to Ensure the Right to Food in the United States, University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, 2024, Vol. 21 (1), pp 49-75. https://repository.law.miami.edu/umiclr/vol31/iss1/6/

Phojanakong P, Welles S, Dugan J, Booshehri L, Brown Weida E, Chilton MM. Trauma-Informed Financial Empowerment Programming Improves Food Security Among Families With Young Children. J Nutr Educ Behav.2020;52(5):465-473. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1499404620300683

Gaines-Turner, Simmons, J, and Chilton, MM. The public health imperative to improve wages and end stigma: Recommendations from SNAP Participants. American Journal of Public Health, November, 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31622134/