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Jessica Jones-Smith is a nutrition epidemiologist who studies social and contextual
determinants of nutrition-related chronic diseases and health disparities. She completed her
Masters of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley and her doctoral degree at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on investigating distal drivers
of nutrition-related health disparities and follows two main lines: 1) documenting disparities in
nutrition-related diseases based on socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity, across the lifespan
and in numerous populations; 2) investigating economic resources as causal factors in health
status. In previous research, she has documented changes in the relationship between
socioeconomic status and overweight prevalence among women in 41 low- and middle-income
countries over the last decade and identified country-level correlates of disproportionately faster
overweight prevalence growth among women with low socioeconomic status in middle-income
countries. Additionally, in this line of research, she has tracked the emergence of a
socioeconomic disparity in overweight among women in China during a period of rapid
economic growth. In her current research, she is using a natural experiment to examine the
extent to which increased economic resources are associated with maternal weight gain and
childhood obesity. Specifically, this study proposes that the introduction of casino-style gaming
to American Indian tribal lands offers a unique opportunity to determine how an exogenous,
sustained influx of economic resources to American Indian communities impacts population
health. By utilizing existing geographically-linked health records in combination with space-time
variation in casino openings in the state of California, this study is unique in its ability to assess
the causal impact of increased economic resources on nutrition-related health. Results from this
project suggest that increased economic resources stemming from casinos have resulted in a
significantly decreased risk for overweight among American Indian children. This research
combines methods and perspectives from public health, nutrition, epidemiology, and economics,
with the long-term goal of investigating structural approaches for improving the nutrition-related
health of populations with low economic resources.