Daniel Zaltz, PhD, MPH
Principal Investigator
Dr. Daniel Zaltz is an Assistant Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. He received a Master of Public Health and Doctor of Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed postdoctoral training in population health research and food policy evaluation in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Dr. Zaltz has held various fellowships during his training as a social and behavioural scientist, including a T32 Predoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Research and Epidemiology in Diabetes and Endocrinology from the US National Institutes of Health, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in population health research.
Dr. Zaltz’s primary areas of interest are food policies, food systems, and the commercial determinants of health. His work is informed by foundational training in nutritional epidemiology, biostatistics, and data science, which he applies to socioecological questions of human health and behaviour. His research has focused on food and beverage policies designed to improve diet and health across populations, with particular attention to early childhood and to health equity across the life course. This work spans the evaluation of dietary intake standards in childcare, sugar-sweetened beverage taxation, front-of-package nutrition labelling, and healthy default menu laws. A complementary strand of his research examines the many ways that large food and beverage corporations influence public policy, shape scientific discourse, and protect their interests through mechanisms such as industry-funded organizations, institutional contracts, and political lobbying.
Dr. Zaltz sits on the editorial board of several leading public health and nutrition journals, and regularly contributes expertise on food and nutrition policies to governmental working groups, multidisciplinary research consortiums, and mass media. He has received funding as a Co- or Principal Investigator from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating Research (HER), and Center for Science in the Public Interest. Dr. Zaltz teaches courses on policy and governance, and mentors undergraduate and graduate students in various capacities. You can learn more about his current projects here.