Jiayu is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Food Choice Lab at Michigan State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University in 2024. Her research focuses on applying diverse methodologies—including economic experiments, large-scale surveys, econometrics, big data, and machine learning—to address societal challenges within food systems. Her goal is to provide science-based evidence that helps retailers, consumers, and policymakers make informed decisions to promote nutrition, sustainability, and resilience in food systems.

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Currently, she is working on a USDA-NIFA-funded project, MealClick (PI: Dr. Vincenzina Caputo), where she utilizes web-scraped menu data from Uber Eats and DoorDash across the U.S. to evaluate online food-away-from-home environments, including cost, sustainability, and nutrition. She also conducts tri-monthly large-scale surveys incorporating basket-based choice experiments to assess consumer demand for online FAFH options.

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To explore more of Jiayu’s published work, please visit her Google Scholar.