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 full 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. We published Canada’s first national estimates of the population distribution of diet costs. My goal is to inform the design of public and organizational policies comprising stronger social protection 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, the largest employer in the province, in a cohort study to examine the role of the workplace food environment in health workers’ purchases, wellbeing, 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. While completing my PhD at the University of Toronto, I practised as a community physician. I received my MD at the University of Calgary and am a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada in clinical paediatrics. 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. 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.

—September 2025

Research Update 2025 —Dr. Mah’s research program comprises a range of consumer research, organization and society studies, as well as population-based observational studies, funded through the Canada Research Chairs program, CIHR Project Grant (current: 2023-2028), and other national and international awards. Over the last year, her team published Canada’s first nationwide estimates of the population distribution of diet costs (Luongo et al. 2024), thesis research by Dr. Gabriella Luongo, CGS Doctoral Award recipient. Dr. Mah’s lab has developed and validated novel data collection and analysis approaches to audit food environments, including recent work by trainee Dr. Nathan Taylor (Taylor et al. 2023), featured last winter on CBC’s The Fifth Estate, and published the first methodological scoping review on price estimation in diet costing (Luongo, Mah et al. 2025). Dr. Mah is furthermore a globally recognized scholar in workplace and organizational nutrition environments. Dr. Mah’s recent graduate, Dr. Laura Kennedy, recipient of NS scholarships and leadership awards, published thesis research this year on the institutional conditions for effective healthcare-based health promotion, using a continuous quality improvement approach (Kennedy et al. 2025a; 2025b). For over a decade, Dr. Mah has been one of the few nutrition scholars in Canada to study structural determinants. She authored the chapter on food insecurity for the new Oxford Handbook on Social Policy in Canada edited by Béland et al. (2025) and published a critique of the right to food in Canada (Mah and McIntyre, 2025). Relatedly, Dr. Mah’s program examines broader topics in consumption society. Dr. Helen Wong, Dr. Mah’s recent graduate and Vanier scholarship recipient, successfully defended her thesis on consumer sociobehavioural responses to food environment digital touchpoints (Wong 2025). In spring/summer 2025, lab members presented their work at several national and international conferences, including meetings of the Canadian Public Health Association (Winnipeg), Canadian Nutrition Society (Montreal), International Conference on Diet and Activity Methods (Toronto), International Congress of Nutrition (Paris), and International Union of Health Promotion and Education (Abu Dhabi). Dr. Mah chaired the plenary on ‘Addressing food insecurity and food affordability at all costs!’ at the Canadian Nutrition Society conference, featuring colleagues Drs. Valerie Tarasuk (University of Toronto) and Benoit Lamarche (Laval). Earlier this term, Dr. Mah was in Ottawa for the October (fall) meeting of the Council of Canadian Academies Scientific Advisory Council, on which she has served since November 2024.   

Recent publications

Speaking & interviews

  • Research profile: Cost and affordability of a healthy diet

    January 25, 2024 [Read]

    Research profile on our team’s latest Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant, which draws from the long tradition of studies on worker health and consumption, in partnership with Nova Scotia Health, the largest employer in the province.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.