Prof Karen Jacobs Receives Target Grant to Support Youth Healthy Eating

Karen Jacobs,  EdD, CPE, OTR/L, FAOTA, Clinical Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy, was awarded an $8,400 grant from Target to support youth healthy eating programs. Jacobs plans to use the funding to support a healthy cooking and eating program with Women and Girls Thriving in Brookline. Programming for women in the local Brookline/Boston area is scheduled to begin this April.

For more than five years, Jacobs has hosted a weekly Sargent Choice Test Kitchen from her StuVi2 faculty residence where she and students prepare a healthy, tasty Sargent Choice recipes each week like brown rice sushi, and fudgy black-bean brownies.

Jacobs is the Program Director of the On-line Post-professional Doctorate in Occupational Therapy (PP-OTD). Her scholarly interests include investigating the individual factors and environmental demands associated with increased risk of functional limitations among populations of university, elementary and middle school aged students, particularly in the use of notebook computing and iPads, as well as the proper wearing of backpacks. Jacobs is also a co-PI on a five-year National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) grant, Project CAREER. Project CAREER is an interprofessional development project designed to improve the employment success of undergraduate college & university students with traumatic brain injury (TBI).