Profil Selma Kronsteiner-Gicevic

Selma Kronsteiner-Gicevic (previously: Selma Gicevic) holds a doctoral degree (Doctor of Science/ScD) from the Harvard University, Boston, USA (2018) and a master of science degree (MSc) in Public Health Nutrition from the University of Westminster, London, UK (2011). In 2019-2020, she was a Postdoctoral IMMANA Research Fellow. She has a multidisciplinary background in nutritional and obesity epidemiology, social and behavioral research methods, and marketing and communications.

During her doctoral studies at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Selma worked with data from a large prospective U.S. cohort Nurses’ Health Study 2 (NHS2) to evaluate associations of pre-pregnancy diets with the risk of gestational diabetes mellitus and hypertension in pregnancy. She examined how different diet quality scores used in both developed and developing countries related to these maternal health outcomes. She also worked on several systematic reviews of literature on the role of various family aspects (e.g. role of fathers, media, and home environment) in onset/prevention of childhood obesity. Finally, she designed and conducted the first population-based nutrition survey at the Institute for Statistics of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and piloted a sustainable model of dietary surveillance for limited-resource settings.

As a postdoctoral researcher with IMMANA (Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions, a program managed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK  and the Tufts University, USA, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) Selma used large U.S. surveillance datasets from NHANES and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate associations between dietary quality and all-cause mortality. Selma also traveled to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania to develop and pilot a novel diet quality assessment tool among women of reproductive age. She designed and conducted studies to evaluate diet quality questionnaires among women in the United States and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

During her master´s studies at the School of Life Sciences of the University of Westminster, Selma conducted a mixed-methods research in kindergartens in Sarajevo (Bosnia) and developed dietary guidelines for children in preschool settings in Bosnia. Subsequently, Selma also initiated an advocacy campaign in partnership with the media, selected parliamentary members and parents´ associations to improve dietary guidelines and nutrition practices in kindergartens.

As a visiting researcher at Harvard TH Chan School´s Department of Nutrition (working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021), Selma participated in several research projects, including development of the Global Diet Quality Score with Intake – Center for Dietary Assessment and  development of a brief diet quality screener for primary health care settings in the U.S. in collaboration with the Mass General Brigham hospital (Boston, USA).

Selma joined the Department of Epidemiology in 2022 as a researcher on an EU STAMIFY-funded, 3-year long project including five EU countries, titled “VEGANScreener” aimed at developing and validating a standardized and brief web- and app-based dietary screening tool to assess and monitor dietary intake among vegans in Europe. The project will include novel biomarker approaches, including metabolomics, towards identifying vegan subtypes.