Ashlea Braun PhD, RD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Promotion Sciences. Dr. Braun brings over ten years of experience as Registered Dietitian, and completed her PhD in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences with a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Clinical and Translational Sciences at The Ohio State University College of Medicine in 2020. Her graduate training centered on the development, implementation, and evaluation of multi-component behavioral interventions designed to target dietary and lifestyle-related behaviors to improve cancer prevention and control. This included the use and evaluation of motivational interviewing, for which she is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network for Trainers. She then completed a position as a postdoctoral scholar, gaining exposure to policy- and environmental-related determinants of health behavior. Thereafter, she worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Oklahoma State University where she received funding as PI or MPI from the Health Promotion Research Center, the Center for the Advancement of Science & Technology (OCAST), Oklahoma Shared Clinical & Translational Resource (OSCTR), and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Her research leverages behavior change approaches and assessment strategies previously validated and employed in substance use literature, including motivational interviewing, to understand and improve health behavior, dietary patterns, weight, and/or cancer risk.
Dr. Braun seeks to identify ways to support individuals in pursuit of behavior change despite increasingly challenging environmental, social, and psychological factors that inhibit or impede change. Her research program and expertise focuses on understanding the bidirectional relationship between food and behavior and leveraging this information to design behavior change interventions. This includes a particular emphasis on specific dietary components of interest (e.g., dietary fiber, ultra-processed foods), as well as the use of autonomy-supportive and empirically-driven approaches to behavior change, including motivational interviewing.