AAPI Career Panel: Finding Your Path in Nutrition and Dietetics

This product is free for AAPI members.

This webinar was presented live on March 31, 2022.

This career panel has four amazing panelists with expertise in culinary nutrition, maternal nutrition, public health, and clinical nutrition. Their work shows various possibilities for dietitians in clinical setting, private practice, business, and research. Our panelists from different backgrounds will be sharing honest insight into their career journeys, from accomplishments to difficulties and everything in between. Whether you are a young professional looking to gain new career advice, a student thinking about your future occupation, or dietitian to learn more about the different paths that these panelists have taken, our Career Panel will cover valuable information for all.

CPEU: 1.5
CPE Level: 1
Performance Indicators: 1.2.1, 2.2.4, 3.2.2

Learning Objectives

1. Describe opportunities and challenges of pursuing a unique career pathway in nutrition and dietetics.
2. Identify options for enhancing nutrition and dietetics skills with training and experiences from other fields.
3. Illustrate the benefits of achieving volunteer and job experiences in diverse areas of the field.

Speakers

Sherene Chou, MS, RDN

Sherene is an award-winning dietitian and chef focused on building a more equitable and sustainable food system through the intersection of plant-based culinary nutrition, food, and social justice. She’s collaborated with national brands and institutions to build innovative programs for more accessible nutrition that focus on culinary nutrition and community empowerment. She serves as the Past Chair for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Vegetarian Nutrition Practice Group, the Advisory Committee for the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative and Padilla’s DE+I Collective.

She co-developed the first Culinary Medicine course at Keck USC School of Medicine, the Certificate of Training on Sustainable Food Systems for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and was featured as one of Today’s Dietitian Magazine’s 10 RDs Making a Difference in 2019. In 2020, she co-founded Food + Planet, an initiative to empower 1 million healthcare professionals to transform the food system and was featured in the New York Times on the importance of diversifying healthcare. Most recently, she was honored by Impossible Foods x Vegan Women Summit as part of their Women Building the Future campaign. You can follow her work @eatsustainablefoods on Instagram.

Lynn Kong, MS, RDN, IBCLC, LDN

Graduated from Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition, Lynn currently works as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) and an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC). In the past 9 years, she has been a WIC program director at Boston. She is also an adjunct professor at Simmons University and Urban College Boston, teaching community nutrition and sociocultural implications of nutrition. In 2019, she started my private practice "Joyful Family LLC", which provides nutrition and lactation consultations for families. She is specialized in perinatal nutrition, lactation, pediatric nutrition, and chronic diseases management.

Her volunteer work at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics includes serving as the Chinese American in Dietetic and Nutrition MIG group (CADN) in the year 2017-2018, as the chair of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders MIG group (AAPI) in 2018-2019, and as the treasurer of AAPI in 2019-2020.

Song Xiong, RD

Song is a registered dietitian with experience in community nutrition, food access and nutrition communication. As the daughter of Hmong refugees, she has experienced firsthand the inequities of the food system and racial microaggressions. This led her to commit herself to tackle inequities in public health nutrition. She is currently tackling inequities through her work at FHI 360 where she supports the development of childhood obesity research tools in partnerships with the CDC, NIH, USDA, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is pursuing her Master of Public Health at George Washington University and resides in the Washington D.C. metro.

Hilary Wu, MS, RD

Hilary is currently the DPD Director at Cal Poly Pomona where she helps to train students to become future dietitians. She is also a clinical dietitian at San Antonio Regional Hospital and skilled nursing facilities in Southern California. She had the opportunity of moving back to Taiwan to work in food service and public health for several years prior to earning her Master of Science in Nutrition from Cal Poly Pomona. In her spare time, she enjoys sipping a cup of coffee with her dogs at home.