Linda Koh

Community Health

Assistant Professor, Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at UMass Amherst

She Is Changing Lives Through Her Passion for Nutrition

Linda Koh’s journey to healthier eating is a lifelong one.

“I’ve had a passion for it for a long time,” she said. “My grandmother was a great cook, and she lived with us, so I was always wanting to learn how to cook. And she was like, ‘no, your job is a student; you need to study.’ She didn’t have opportunities to study when she was younger, so she always encouraged me to study, but I was always interested in food.”

Around the third grade, her father visited Massachusetts to attend a lecture about the Framingham Heart Study, and how red meat can put people at higher risk for heart disease and certain types of cancer.

“He came home from that presentation and said, ‘we’re going to be vegetarian.’ So overnight, we stopped eating meat, and that was kind of traumatic for me because I was like, ‘what are we going to live on? I’m not used to this.’”

But Koh stuck with it, and when she got married, she and her husband made the decision to go vegan, and have stuck to a plant-based diet for the past 13 years.

“We’ve seen in our own lives how it’s impacted our health. We used to have seasonal allergies, and we don’t have those anymore, so if it works for us, I’m sure it could be helpful for other people.”

So she speaks from experience in the work she does today — as an educator shaping future nurses at the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at UMass Amherst, as well as an emerging leader creating partnerships around nutrition and sustainable food systems.

Take it from Crystal Neuhauser, chief Development officer at the Marieb College, who nominated Koh as a Healthcare Hero.

“Through her innovative research, collaborative partnerships, and culturally grounded pedagogy, she is reshaping the healthcare landscape in Western Massachusetts — empowering individuals, training future nurses, and building healthier, more equitable communities,” Neuhauser wrote.

As noted above, Koh — like others in this year’s class of Healthcare Heroes — could easily be recognized in a few different categories, including Emerging Leader, Collaboration in Healthcare, and Healthcare Educator. But Community Health seemed most apprropriate because her impact on the community, by helping people change the way they look at food and nutrition, is significant, and growing.

“Dr. Koh’s impact is clear: families eating better, students entering the workforce more prepared, and communities being heard,” Neuhauser added. “What makes her heroic is not just her scholarship — it’s her radical belief that everyone deserves to live with health, dignity, and joy. Her work is already changing lives in Western Massachusetts. Her leadership ensures those changes will endure.”

Cross-country Impact

Koh grew up in Southern California, and her early educational and career experiences took her to several far-flung locales.

“I worked in nursing in Colorado, I taught English for one year in Ukraine, and I also did an internship in Denmark in health program planning, so I had all these different ideas of things I was interested in.”

“Up to that point, I had mostly been working with adults, but because I wanted to do something more with the whole family and community, I was looking for opportunities where I could expand to work with kids.”

But she eventually pursued an associate’s degree program in nursing, and worked in that field for about 15 years. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to work in a hospital for the rest of her life.

“After 15 years, it was already starting to kind of wear on me. My husband was like, ‘if you go back to school, think of the impact that you could have if you teach.’ So I decided to go back to school.”

Koh wound up at UMass for her graduate studies, but then returned to California — Stanford University, to be specific — for post-doctoral research work, where she worked with a pediatric gastroenterologist at a weight-management clinic.

“I got a lot of experience working with patients in the clinical setting,” she recalled. “Up to that point, I had mostly been working with adults, but because I wanted to do something more with the whole family and community, I was looking for opportunities where I could expand to work with kids.

Linda Koh led the development of “Full Plate for Kids,” an activity book that teaches children about good nutrition.

“So I worked with that professor and clinician for one year, and then I got a grant that enabled me to stay on for a second year as a post-doc working with Dr. Christopher Gardner, who does all the nutrition research studies within the Stanford Prevention Research Center.”

At the time, he had a side project called Farm to Table Camp, a summer camp that brought kids to an organic farm. “Kids from kindergarten to eighth grade could go and learn how to grow food, how to harvest it, how to prepare it. I thought, ‘this is amazing. I wish like every child could have this opportunity.’”

Gardner encouraged Koh to apply for a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health in Oklahoma, which has a nutrition education program called Full Plate. “I was thinking it would be great if we could take something like this and turn it into like nutrition education for kids.”

So she did, producing an activity book called Full Plate for Kids, which explains concepts like fruits, vegetables, fiber, and other parts of a healthy diet, as well as how food is grown, how to prepare simple, healthy meals, and more.

Much of her work so far has been based in California, but since starting work at UMass, Koh has been busy locally. She recently secured a grant to work with a graduate student on a nutrition project this fall, and is working on another to have more students involved in the spring. “So I’m trying to get more people involved in nutrition and also help to educate the next generation of nurse scientists.”

The activity book and other efforts aimed at children and their families can be impactful, she noted.

“A lot of kids have an aversion to vegetables,” she noted. “So we need to figure out ways to encourage people to eat more vegetables and whole grains and beans, nuts and seeds. And so if we can do it from a young age, I think they can reap the benefits of that long-term.”

She talked about working in a community health center as part of her dissertation work, and right next to it was a food bank; patients could come to the health center for their appointments, and then go next door and get a box of food.

“I noticed that they would keep most of the canned goods, but all the fresh fruits and vegetables, they would just leave in a pile next to the trash can when they were leaving. And I wondered why they were doing that. So I started talking to some of them, and they would say things like, ‘I don’t know how to prepare it.’ Or ‘My family doesn’t like it.’ Or ‘I don’t have a refrigerator.’

“So, for my dissertation work, I really focused on teaching adults how to prepare things in a quick and easy way that takes less than 15 to 20 minutes,” she continued. “We also talked about eating things in season and how to create a menu plan where you can make meals on $5 a day, stuff like that.”

Meanwhile, Koh saw from her camp experience the impact education and exposure could have on young people over just a few days.

“A lot of kids have an aversion to vegetables. So we need to figure out ways to encourage people to eat more vegetables and whole grains and beans, nuts and seeds. And so if we can do it from a young age, I think they can reap the benefits of that long-term.”

“The first day, we’d have children that say, ‘oh, I don’t like any vegetables; I’m not eating this. I’ll help prepare it, but I’m not going to eat it.’ Or they’d say, ‘I’ve seen that at home; I don’t like it.’ Then, by Wednesday or Thursday, they’re eating it. On Friday, we had salad day; we had a huge salad bar with all the vegetables from the farm, and the parents were in shock to see their kids piling kale onto their plates, things like that. So in just that short time frame, I feel like we made an impact, and that’s something they can take home to their families, and then it can impact the whole community.”

Food for Thought

This fall, at the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, Koh will be teaching a doctoral-level class in community engagement and community building — essentially, how to work in partnership with other community members. She’ll also be teaching undergraduate courses in writing and nursing ethics.

“Dr. Koh is a leader in advancing nursing education that responds to the needs of diverse communities,” Neuhauser wrote. “She mentors undergraduate and graduate students in culturally responsive care, sustainable food systems, and health equity research. Many of her students come from communities underrepresented in nursing and go on to serve in local health centers, schools, and public health departments. By embedding equity into clinical practice and community engagement, Dr. Koh is training a new generation of nurses to serve Western Massachusetts with compassion and cultural humility.”

One of the reasons Koh is excited to be at UMass is this region’s strong agriculture economy.

Linda Koh, right, with (from left) Natacha Costa, Angela Williams, Dr. Christopher Gardner, and Claire Paul at a Stanford University summer internship program.
Photo by Shelley Anderson

“I’ve met quite a few people in soil science and nutrition and at the School of Agriculture; they’re doing a lot of different things. I’m hopeful that we can get a teaching kitchen going in the future — one in the community and also one here on campus, and do more collaborative projects together.”

Koh’s mentor at Stanford recently received a grant to work with a nonprofit organization in more than 600 schools across the nation, going into school cafeterias and helping them get involved with local farms, improving their scratch cooking, and removing excess sugar. She’d like to see more efforts like that nationally, but for now, she’s determined to do what she can in Massachusetts.

“I feel like nutrition is something that everybody can get excited about because everybody has to eat, and everybody has memories of their favorite foods, or foods they ate when they were growing up, or around holidays. So that whole community-engagement piece together with nutrition, that’s where my interests lie.”

And to see the impact, even if it’s on just one student or one family at a time … well, she finds that highly rewarding.

“When I worked inpatient, seeing people coming out of surgery or who had just gotten a diagnosis, they start thinking, ‘did I do something wrong? Was there anything I could have done to prevent this?’ And I feel like nutrition is one of the ways that people can feel like they’re actually directly impacting their health in a small way. And by starting young, I feel those are lessons they can carry with them throughout their entire lifetime.

“One of my lifelong goals is to be the bridge between academia and the general public. A lot of times, people are doing this great research, but they don’t know how to share that with the general public, and it can be like 10, 15 years before people find out about it,” she added. “I just feel like health is so important, and if you don’t have it, it impacts every other part of your life. And I want to help people live happy and healthy lives.”

For her commitment to doing just that — and for the broad impact this work will eventually have — Koh is certainly a Healthcare Hero.