Sarah K. Khan is an Assistant Scientist at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Family Medicine in the Integrative Medicine division. Dr. Khan is developing clinical research interventions that address obesity from a multidisciplinary perspective incorporating healthy culinary, mindfulness and movement practices for diverse communities. She is also working in South Milwaukee to develop built environment research as it relates to nutrition and food security in collaboration with CORE/El Centro and Aurora Walker's Point Community Clinic. She edits the UW's Integrative Medicine Updates Newsletter where she introduced a section entitled "Foodways" to educate clinicians about food traditions, healing, and culture.

Grants, Awards, Fellowships

• UW-Madison, Department of Family Medicine Small Grant for research on "Weight Management Needs Assessment Surveys for Patients and Primary Care Practitioners at Odana Atrium Clinic" (2008)
• The UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) for research on "Intervention for Adults with Obesity: Feasibility Study" (2008)
• The Center for Global Health Educational Travel Fellowships Awarded (2008). She is developing an exchange program with the Foundation for the Revitalization of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) and UW-Integrative Medicine Program in Bangalore, Karnataka India for UW-Madison and US medical residents to experience non-Western healing modalities in 2010. The exchange program will provide medical residents with an opportunity to learn about and experience the diverse South Asian healing arts in an academic setting.
• Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program (2009-10), Sustainability Institute.

Background

Dr. Khan received her BA from Smith College majoring in Middle Eastern History and Arabic. She then pursued two Masters Degrees: one in Public Health (with a focus on women and infants) and the other in Human Clinical Nutrition both at Columbia University. It was during her six months of fieldwork among the Bedouin of the Negev desert (where she conducted a pilot study on infant morbidity and variety of food ingested) that she began to learn about Bedouin food culture, herbal, and healing traditions.

In 1996, she finished her thesis, and established a private nutritional consulting practice in New York. Through 2001, while counseling, she taught basic nutrition classes at The Natural Gourmet Institute's Chefs' Training Program and at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine; developed a public lecture series on Women's Health Challenges with a focus on food, herbs, and nutrients (at The New York Open Center and Natural Gourmet Institute Public Classes); taught two courses entitled "Ethnobotany: Plants and People" in the Biology Department and "Health and Nutrition" in the Department of Health Services both at Lehman College, Bronx, NY as an adjunct lecturer; and provided regular nutritional consulting to a public school-based health clinic in Brooklyn.

To complement her clinical research in public health and nutrition, she completed a Ph.D. in Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems/Botany from New York Botanical Garden/CUNY Graduate School with a specialization in South Asian and Asian Healing systems, specifically Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine--two traditions that classify food as medicine. For her doctoral fieldwork, she conducted two pilot clinical research studies: Ayurveda and Diabetes in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, and TCM and Diabetes in Shanghai, China.

Grants, Awards, Fellowships, Boards prior to 2008

She has received grants to conduct fieldwork in the Middle East, India, and China:

• The Excellence in Nutrition Fellowship from the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University (Negev 1995)
• The J. William Fulbright Fellowship (India 2001)
• Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens: Botany In Action, multiple grants (India, China 2003-2006)
• The Council of the American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC-Smithsonian) Multi-Country Fellowship Program (India 2003)
• Whole Thinking Retreats Fellowship sponsored by Center for Whole Communities at Knoll Farm in Fayston, VT (2007) where race and environmental issues are explored
• Advisory Committee for the "Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas", a multi-institutional arts festival and conference scheduled to launch in June 2009 in New York City (2008-09)
• Council Member-at-Large of the Society of Economic Botany (2008-11)
• The Advisory Committee for The Institute for Specialty and Integrative Services at the Brownsville Multiservice Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY (2008)
• Board of Advisors of the Natural Gourmet Institute of Food and Culinary Arts since 2003

Languages:

Fluent: English and French
Conversation: Urdu/Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese
Basic: Mandarin