Meet Allison Miner. Miner is thrilled to join the Nutrition and Food Studies department as an instructional assistant professor. She started as a fashion design major in college, but after taking a nutrition course for her science requirement, she was hooked. Miner wanted to have a career that helped improve people’s health through disease prevention and felt nutrition was the answer. Shortly after graduating with a master’s degree, she entered the field of education which allowed her to explore many aspects of dietetics such as teaching, curriculum development, online education, mentoring, research, writing, public speaking, as well as serving on committees and boards.
The classroom is Miner’s research laboratory where she has learned best practices in education. Just before coming to Mason, she taught part-time at George Washington University as a lecturer in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences in the Milken Institute School of Public Health, teaching graduate courses in food policy and nutrition assessment. Miner also served as a clinical dietitian at Inova Alexandria Hospital, and community dietitian at the Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration (TSA). At the TSA, she moderated a virtual weekly weight loss support group which is available to its 68,000+ employees.
Miner became very passionate about the quality of online education through developing curriculum for and facilitating her first online course at Prince George’s Community College in 2001. On 9/11, she learned the value of online education as it allowed all her students to continue with their education despite being deployed or worried about their safety. It also demonstrated that online education could decrease much of the unintentional bias concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and ageism that inadvertently occur in a face-to-face environment.
Miner was lucky to have trained with the creators of the Quality Matter, Inc. rubric, a scoring system used by a peer review team to determine whether a course meets standards of quality in online education, and consequently served as a Quality Matters trainer for colleges and universities nationally and internationally. Miner took a sabbatical for a year at Florida International University to train faculty and instructional designers how to implement the Quality Matters rubric in their online courses. She says it was very pleasurable sharing her knowledge about curriculum design and best practices in online learning with faculty, instructional designers, and administrators. Wherever Miner goes, students inevitably relate disturbing stories about their experiences taking online courses, so she sees it as a mission to help improve this increasingly popular way of learning.
Recently, Miner was hired as an inclusion and diversity consultant at Cengage, Inc. where she uses her knowledge of nutrition and health to ensure textbook language adheres to equity and inclusion principles. Many common phrases, terms, and colloquialisms are rooted in unconscious inequity against cultures, religions, genders, and abilities.
Miner is very active in her community of Old Town Alexandria where she served as a commissioner on the Alexandria Public Health Commission. Once per month, she is featured on a nutrition segment on the Power Bloc radio show where she discusses health issues relevant to the African American urban community. Miner was selected to be a member of the International WELL Building Institute, Nourishment Advisory Board which provides a roadmap for creating and certifying spaces that advance human health and well-being. She worked on improving nutrition standards at eating establishments in commercial properties.
Miner holds a bachelor’s degree in dietetics and a master’s degree in international nutrition from the University of Maryland, as well as a doctorate in education from Morgan State University. She is a Registered Dietitian, who is licensed in the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia (Virginia has no licensure requirements).
Miner’s research interests include obesity among women especially African American women and promoting the benefits of urban food gardening for low-income, low-access populations. She is a fitness enthusiast and loves to take on new projects that help increase her understanding of the world. Miner is married with two grown children and one very adorable grandson whom she refers to as “Shep.”