Dr. Sydney Pryor

Sydney Pryor, PhD, MPH is a Research Scientist and Adjunct Professor with the Global Food Institute (GFI) at GW. Applying her interdisciplinary background in nutrition, public health, and food policy to the field of sustainable food systems, she is passionate about understanding how complex food system interactions influence the production and consumption of healthy and sustainable diets. Sydney is dedicated to growing attention to the role food systems can play in advancing human and planetary health through research, advocacy, and teaching, with a primary focus on applying systems science to support decision-making related to plant-rich diets, sustainability, and equitable food and nutrition security across local, national, and international contexts.

Sydney’s current focus is on Crisis-Resilient School Meals in Haiti, a collaborative project between GFI and partner organizations - Acceso, Summits Education, and Haiti Food Systems Alliance - who work across the food system and school feeding ecosystem in Haiti. The project aims to improve school feeding and locally-sourced school meals through strengthening farmer production and supply chain infrastructure, with a goal of showing how school meals can deliver reliable daily nutrition and build foundations for long-term resilience, including during emergencies. GFI is supporting this project as an analytic partner, working with these organizations and local actors to document locally-driven perspectives on school feeding and food system resilience through food systems mapping and analysis, data analytics, and resilience monitoring. Ultimately, the work aims to empower local actors to assess the resilience benefits of investments across the food system.

Sydney also teaches Systems Thinking for Sustainable Agrifood Systems Transformation as part of GFI’s Food Leadership Minor and the Sustainability Minor at GW. Prior to GFI, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer with the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, examining decision-making, consumer perspectives, and policy related to food and sustainability (e.g., plant-rich diets, farmer fertilizer use, food labeling, community food access, farm-to-school programs. Sydney holds a B.S. in Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise from Virginia Tech, an MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Public Health Modeling from Yale, and a PhD in Health Policy from GW.