Catherine L. Mah MD PhD is Professor and Canada Research Chair at Dalhousie University, recipient of a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for public service.

I am a professor at Dalhousie University, most widely known for my scientific work in nutrition and food insecurity policy. My lab has been recently occupied with questions about food affordability: inequities in food pricing, drivers of purchasing substitutions, cost of a healthy diet. My goal is to inform the design of policies comprising a stronger social safety net for Canada, as well as indicators used for routine governmental decision-making. In addition I am doing some theoretical work on social and material relations around food affordability in consumer society. Although I have been working for many years as a scientist and in randomized controlled trials, my first education was in conservatory performing arts. I have found ways for interpretation to exist happily alongside analysis in my scholarly work.

My latest project grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2023-2028) partners with Nova Scotia’s provincial health authority to examine how workplace food pricing shapes health workers’ purchases and diet quality. The study is made possible through methodological and infrastructural developments in nutrition using person-level longitudinal purchasing data. Don’t @ me as a methodological individualist! Since graduate school I have had an enduring concern with how the collective (and institutional, common, solidarities, universal etc.) exists in contingent relation to the individual (personalisation, difference, targeting, particular etc.) in explanation and ontology for health and social policy. An abstraction? No: while completing my PhD, I practised as a community paediatrician for seven years. My doctoral thesis, Governing Immunization in Canada, examined evolving personalisation within the Canadian public health regulatory framework, federal-provincial-territorial relations, and novel vaccine programs.

Thinking about the fate of pluralism keeps me up at night—really, I have awful insomnia. My latest favourites for taming the grey matter are short stories in translation. When I am not working you can usually find me elbows deep in bread dough and a book. Here is a list of what I was reading last winter (scroll to the bottom) for Freedom to Read Week.

—July 2024

Recent publications

Speaking & interviews

  • GSJ&Co: Welcome to the Food Court S2E2

    October 31, 2016 [Listen]

    An oldie but a goodie (phew earnest 2016)! A conversation with Canada’s favourite food lawyer, Glenford Jameson, about health promotion, food and municipalities, soda taxes, and how the (policy) sausage gets made.

  • President Kim Brooks Installation: Place

    October 8, 2023 [Watch]

    This place was not a space until I was in it, here, with you. Convocation address celebrating Dalhousie’s 13th Presidential Installation. In health research, space usually refers to physical/built environments that shape health; place refers to relationality and meaning of those spaces in social terms. I used new materialisms theory to craft this speech, a call for pluralism.

  • MacEachen Institute Policy Matters: Food

    September 17, 2019 [Watch]

    Policy reflects who we are as a society, and who we want to become. Panel discussion with some of my brilliant Dalhousie food policy and law research colleagues on the Right to Food and priority issues for the 2019 Canadian federal election.

  • Research profile: Cost and affordability of a healthy diet

    January 25, 2024 [Read]

    Many vectors of socioeconomic disparities in health are increasing, and food affordability is a cross-cutting one. Research profile by the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie on our team’s latest Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant, the PRICES study.

  • MIT Technology Review: The Food Issue

    December 18, 2020 [Read]

    Buying and selling food online: good for our diets? Interview on e-commerce regulation, industry transitions during the pandemic, and the public interest.

  • Science Meets Parliament at CSPC 2021

    November 26, 2021 [Watch]

    Till we meet again in Centre Block. Panel retrospective at the virtual 2021 Canadian Science Policy Conference. Scientists and parliamentarians from the inaugural Science Meets Parliament program reflect on our experience.

  • Japan-Canada Food Systems Resilience Symposium

    May 16-17, 2012 [Archived event]

    I was a postdoctoral fellow in social policy at Kyoto University (2009-2010). The research relationships started would allow for us to organize a Japan-Canada policy colloquium on food systems resilience in Toronto just a few years later at the Munk School, after the tragedy of the 3/11 Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster, presenting outcomes to the Consulate-General of Japan.

  • Debate on business in nutrition: Food Governance Conference

    November 3, 2016 [Archived program, report]

    At the inaugural University of Sydney Food Governance Conference in 2016, I spoke on the closing panel, a debate on the role of business in nutrition and chronic diseases prevention.

  • APTN x CBC's Fifth Estate S49E11: Cost of Food

    February 23, 2024 [Overview, Watch]

    APTN Investigates and CBC News The Fifth Estate collaborated to produce this investigation into major grocers in Canada and inequities in the cost of food. I joined from Halifax to introduce our lab’s research on a digital National Nutritious Food Basket.