M. Fuster

Design Thinking Breakfast at Fritai

Last week, we had our first community engagement event in New Orleans: a design thinking breakfast! These events are hosted by Tulane University’s Taylor Center, as informal and playful community-building spaces for experimenting with design, design thinking, and related methods for social impact. We spent the morning at Fritai, a Haitian restaurant located in theContinue reading “Design Thinking Breakfast at Fritai”

New Publication: Results from our restaurant listening sessions

Originally posted on Melissa Fuster, PhD:
This post is to celebrate a new publication: Promoting healthy eating in Latin American restaurants. The article presents the findings from our initial listening sessions with Latin American restaurant stakeholders for my restaurant research project. Our efforts began almost two years ago, in the fall of 2020, after the…

Sharing our research: Brooklyn College Magazine

We are thrilled about this article published in this month’s Brooklyn College Magazine, “Resiliency Issue.” The piece profiles our project director, Dr. Melissa Fuster, talking about the motivation behind this work, plus two members of our research team: Tara Frank and Elise Harrison. We are thankful for this spotlight, and to La Loncheria’s owner andContinue reading “Sharing our research: Brooklyn College Magazine”

Learning from listening sessions

An update from our second round of discussions with Latin American restaurant owners and staff.

First round of listening sessions completed!

We are thrilled to share that this week we completed our first round of discussions with owners of Latin American restaurants! The discussions provided us with needed insights on the experiences of restaurants owners during these difficult times. At the same time, we also learned about the innovative approaches restaurants have taken to survive theContinue reading “First round of listening sessions completed!”

Introducting LARiA

This post was originally published in Comida Studies, introducing the Latin American Restaurants in Action Project, written by the project director, Dr. Melissa Fuster. Last March, when I drafted my dispatch for Gastronomica’s special edition on Food in Times of COVID-19, I wrote from a place of uncertainty. My article, Community Health Research, Restaurants, andContinue reading “Introducting LARiA”