Bio
Daniel is a social and behavioural scientist. He received a Master of Public Health and Doctor of Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. During his masters, Daniel studied the implementation and evaluation of healthy eating and physical activity policies in US early care and education. He received training in health advocacy and worked alongside public health advocates examining the design of emergent policies related to e-cigarette marketing. Daniel worked thereafter as a program manager and data analyst within a research center focused on public health messaging campaigns related to healthy eating and dietary behaviours. He also worked as a research assistant within a child cohort study focused on early childhood eating, growth trajectories, and food environments.
Daniel completed his doctoral studies under the supervision of Sara Benjamin-Neelon, PhD, JD, RD. His thesis focused on early life correlates of less healthy beverage consumption, with a focus on out-of-home food environments. He was awarded a T32 Predoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Research and Epidemiology in Diabetes and Endocrinology from the US National Institutes, under the mentorship of Todd Brown, MD, PhD in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Daniel pursued two broad fields of study during his doctoral training: first, with a foundation in nutritional epidemiology, biostatistics, and data science, Daniel contributed to various studies of dietary intake, health, and policy;[1][2][3] and second, with training in sociology of health and mixed methods, he contributed to studies of commercial determinants of nutritional health, with a focus on food industry influence within institituional and governmental policymaking processes.[4][5]
After his doctoral training, Daniel received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health in population health research under the mentorship of Mary L’Abbé, CM, PhD in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto Temerty Faculty of Medicine. Daniel was co-supervised by Wendy Lou, PhD, in the Biostatistics Division of the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health. During this time, he also received a fellowship from the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre, D.H. Gales Family Charitable Foundation. Daniel’s postdoctoral research focused on free sugars in the Canadian diet,[6] front-of-package nutrient labeling,[7] and the evaluation of Canada’s first sugar-sweetened beverage tax which was implemented in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2022.[8][9][10] During this time, Daniel also taught Food Policy and Nutritional Health to undergraduate students in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Daniel joined the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa in 2026 as an Assistant Professor. His research focuses on food policies, food systems, and the commercial determinants of health. During the winter term, Daniel teaches Public Health Governance to graduate students. You can learn more about his current projects here.