Christina Chung, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering assistant professor of informatics, has won a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award – and will receive a $605,063 grant – for her research in designing personal informatics systems to support healthy eating habits during life transitions.
CAREER Awards support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
The National Science Foundation funds research and education in science and engineering through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements.
Since arriving at IU in 2018, Chung has made significant impact in research, education and mentorship, including the informatics Precision Health Initiative project, said Katie Siek, professor and chair of informatics.
“Christina is an outstanding junior faculty who has made major contributions to ambitious projects during her time at IU,” Siek said. “She is an intellectual leader whose research benefits others. Luddy is fortunate to have such an amazing colleague, mentor and educator.”
For the CAREER Award, Chung’s research will facilitate understanding people’s needs and the challenges of healthy eating when routines change, and then create design principles for technologies such as smartwatches and mobile tracking applications, which monitor and support healthy eating goals and lifestyles. Currently, these technologies direct people to create and maintain goals such as walking 10,000 steps a day or eating a certain number of calories a day. However, life changes such as moving to a new location, taking a new job or family illness can interfere with people’s ability to maintain those goals.
Chung said current information systems don’t consider those changes, and lack specific guidance for people when change happens.
“Healthy eating is integral in everyday life and behavior,” Chung said, “but life changes or transitions could influence other health behaviors, such as exercise, sleep, and mental well-being.”
Chung’s research will facilitate understanding people’s needs and the challenges of healthy eating when routines change, and then create design principles for technologies. It will evaluate the usefulness, usability and engagement of these new designs. She said this could help with improved educational opportunities and outreach activities for universities, high schools and local communities.
“Our research aims to systematically examine how changes at various levels – individual, family, community, and society – impact people’s lives,” Chung said. “By studying both small everyday changes and major life events, we hope to develop design guidelines and extend theoretical models for personal informatics technology that can better support individuals in coping with these changes.”
Chung said this project was inspired by her 2020 NSF CRII award for examining how technology design could help support remote family members, including older adults living alone, to communicate about healthy eating.
During the pandemic, and thanks to the support provided by her 2020/21 Luddy Faculty Fellowship, Chung and her students studied how people changed their cooking and eating habits depending on factors such as a daycare closure, job loss, death of a loved one and food system disruption.
“Understanding these potentially conflicting values and priorities in the context of changes is important to support people in healthy eating,” she said.
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