Assistant Professor
Brooklyn College
Dr. Margrethe F. Horlyck-Romanovsky’s career is dedicated to addressing health disparities and inequities in NYC underserved communities using community-based participatory research. From 2001 to 2010 Dr. Horlyck-Romanovsky worked on large-scale USDA SNAP-Ed contracts implementing nutrition education programs in NYC low-income schools and neighborhoods. She returned to graduate school to create more effective public health programs, facilitate community participatory approaches, mentor better public health practitioners, and find better ways to assess program effectiveness. During her graduate studies, Dr. Horlyck-Romanovsky formed the Immigrant Health Lab with teams of nutrition, pre-med, and health sciences students as research associates and community health workers.
After getting a DrPH, Dr. Horlyck-Romanovsky began a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. During the fellowship, she mastered the derivation of prediction algorithms and was trained to conduct a clinical research protocol. In 2019, Dr. Horlyck-Romanovsky became an assistant professor at Brooklyn College. Her lab examines a) intraethnic health variation in populations of African descent, b) adaptation of nutrition assessment tools to better capture dietary intake among immigrant populations, and c) piloting culturally adapted versions of the CDC's Diabetes Prevention Programs. With the Immigrant Health Lab at Brooklyn College, she has established a learning lab for the future public health labor force. Her team has uncovered significant health inequities and differences in risk of type 2 diabetes within populations of African origin illustrating the dangers of categorizing populations primarily by race or ethnicity alone.