Dr. Micha is an Associate Research Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She is trained as a clinical dietitian, public health nutritionist, and epidemiologist and has expertise in nutritional and chronic disease epidemiology – mainly diet assessment and modeling of impacts on cardiometabolic health – and in nutrition/ health policy. Dr. Micha has particular interest and experience in global dietary assessment among various population subgroups, identifying causal diet-disease relationships, quantifying and modeling the impact of dietary habits on cardiometabolic disease outcomes, and evaluating the comparative- and cost- effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive population interventions to address these disease burdens and prevent cardiometabolic disease.

Dr. Micha played a central role in the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases Study Nutrition and Chronic Diseases Expert Group (NutriCoDE) aiming to characterize diet and impacts on non-communicable disease burden in all countries worldwide, and is a co-investigator of current iterations of the Global Dietary Database Initiative. She was instrumental in the design and development of the Hellenic National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (H-NHANES), the largest surveillance survey of its kind to ever take place in Greece.

Dr. Micha currently leads a World Bank-funded project to assess potential utility of household budget survey datasets for assessing individual-level dietary intakes. She is the PI of a Unilever R&D grant to prospectively assess and quantify the relationship between fatty acid biomarkers and incident chronic disease outcomes in 30+ cohorts globally. Dr. Micha is also the PI of an NIH/NHLBI R01 (R01 HL130735) “Economic Analyses of Policy Strategies to Improve Diet and Reduce CVD” that aims to evaluate the costs, cost-effectiveness, legal and political feasibility of specific evidence-based policies to improve diet and reduce cardiovascular disease in the U.S.. The findings will be critical to inform the planning, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based dietary strategies to achieve optimal cardiometabolic health and reduce inequities for all Americans.