We are excited to welcome Nina Omeaku to the Center as the new Director of the Healthy Eating and Active Living (HEAL) team. With a rich interdisciplinary background that spans public health, law, and policy, Nina brings a thoughtful approach to our work, grounded in lived experience and a commitment to health equity.
“The HEAL team is thrilled to bring Nina on as our new Director,” said Emma Schubert, a Policy Analyst on our HEAL team. “The Center’s commitment to food justice and equitable opportunities for physical activity and better mobility are more important today than ever. Nina’s leadership and strong vision will undoubtedly strengthen and expand the HEAL team’s work, reach, and mission in support of better health for all.”
Nina’s path to public health began with an early interest in law after she learned about the Supreme Court in grade school. It demonstrated how impactful law and legal advocacy could be on the lives of many, especially those without institutional power. As an undergraduate at Emory University, she enrolled in a global health course that shifted her thinking. “It opened up the idea of public health and how integral it is in shaping society,” she said.
With her family’s origins from southeastern Nigeria (Igbo), Nina learned firsthand how the lack of infrastructure can shape health outcomes. “An illness that could easily be treated becomes a death sentence without access to a doctor or the necessary treatment,” she explains. That early understanding didn’t just inform her worldview: it fueled her passion for public health.
As she was completing her law degree, Nina began pursuing a master’s degree in public health, guided by the understanding that complex, real-world problems don’t fit into one discipline. “We’re facing intersectional challenges—like food access and climate justice—that require intersectional solutions,” she says.
Nina carried that perspective into her early legal career. As a general practice attorney, she served as a child attorney, guardian ad litem, and assistant juvenile prosecutor, supporting children in dependency cases involving abuse and neglect. She describes how at first glance, this might not seem like a public health role, but she saw it differently. “To me, it was one part of public health—our child welfare system and its complexities are the early settings that establish many people’s relationships with institutions and plant the seeds for what their public health journey looks like.”
Nina later joined the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where she led and supported policy and legal epidemiology initiatives across a range of topics—from stroke systems of care to community health worker initiatives to civil rights policy. While there, she played a key role in advancing the CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative, collaborating with the National Center for Environmental Health to map the progression of laws over time across jurisdictions. For Nina, this project highlighted the value of translating complex data to make it more accessible and user-friendly. “My goal in communicating is not to just be heard, but to be understood,” she says.
Nina is also intentional about how she weaves personal and professional experiences into stories that resonate with others. Quoting writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she shares, “Our history clings to us. We are shaped by where we come from.” Nina draws on her family’s immigrant experience to build connections across cultures and communities. She emphasizes, “It’s important to incorporate cultural relativism in the foundation of the system changes we hope to see. Otherwise, you risk leaving people feeling othered and excluded, ultimately perpetuating an environment steeped in historic and present-day inequities. Our collective goal should be to co-create an effective and sustainable infrastructure that honors the histories that live within all of us.”
As Nina settles into her new role, she is focused on understanding the strengths, perspectives, and passions of the HEAL team—not to expand just for the sake of scale, but to deepen the team’s impact within the Center and the communities it serves. As she points out, “Laws and policies are everywhere—in the food we eat, the air we breathe. It’s important for us to figure out how to use them to move us forward in a way that’s beneficial to everyone.”
We look forward to Nina leading the HEAL team, with her commitment to achieving work that is impactful, thoughtful, and grounded in equity. Learn more about our healthy eating and active living programs.