BRESCIA FACULTY PROFILES WITH THE BUZZ - March EDITION: DR. Danielle Battram
Dr. Danielle Battram’s office sits in a quiet corner of Ursuline Hall – small but cozy. On the wall hangs degree after degree in foods and nutrition from the University of Guelph. Dr. Battram returned to her hometown of London after her degrees to teach foods and nutrition here at Brescia, citing Brescia’s ability to work with her and their lenience to let her take what she needed to succeed for her reason to come back.
Dr. Battram grew up in the Byron area of London, in the “old section”. When describing the area, Battram said it was “lovely...probably some of my neighbours still live on the court where I grew up.” She went to the university of Guelph for her undergrad, starting with a degree in chemistry but eventually switching to foods and nutrition. While she liked chemistry, foods and nutrition seemed more applicable, and she fell in love with it after taking just one nutrition course.
Dr. Battram now sits as an associate professor of foods and nutrition at Brescia. She also acts as a coordinator within the school, assisting the chair of Brescia in ensuring that all Brescia competencies are followed. However, throughout all of this, there is one thing that she is most passionate about in her job – learning. She loves learning and discussing what she has learned with her students and her colleagues. She loves how her job allows her to learn more about foods and nutrition and how she gets to discuss that.
Battram also works with the community in London to spread food literacy among London’s youth. She has worked with the Nutrition Ignition program for the past eight years, helping elementary and high school students learn about food and diets. Battram cited a specific case study she did with her high school students where they discussed how to create a diet for a sports athlete and how they made food in a food lab for an athlete.
According to Battram, foods and nutrition is an all-encompassing study that “looks at all things food,” which can be anything from what food is from a biological standpoint to food poverty to what specific people could eat. It applies to everybody because “we all eat”. It has impacts on our social relationships, not just our physical health. It is a constant study because the study of food and nutrition is constantly changing as new information about what makes up food is arriving.
Battram would also highly recommend Brescia’s foods and nutrition program for two reasons: our small class sizes and our hands-on learning. Just walking through the academic pavilion, we can see the food labs in which our foods and nutrition students learn. Moreover, we all know that we can learn better when our professor knows our name, rather than in classes of four hundred students where a professor might not even know what we look like.
Aside from foods and nutrition, Dr. Battram is also an avid photographer. She loves taking pictures of nature and of her nieces and nephew.