Celeste M. Torio
Program Officer
Celeste Torio, Ph.D., M.P.H., joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2007 and serves as a Research and Evaluation program officer in the area of childhood obesity prevention. She was drawn to the Foundation by “its potential to affect policy-makers, its commitment to stemming the tide of childhood obesity, and its ability to serve more vulnerable populations.”
Torio’s research evaluation projects include managing the evaluation of an RWJF-funded project in which the Arkansas legislature enacted the most ambitious school reforms in the nation to limit vending of sodas and foods of limited nutritional value. She also manages the Active Living Research national program, which supports research that identifies and assesses structural, environmental, and policy changes to increase levels of physical activity across the nation. She is currently developing the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) infrastructure program that includes interactive mapping and analysis tools to aid in the reversal of the childhood obesity epidemic.
Previously, Torio was a Congressional Health Policy Fellow for Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions. She also was a consultant for the Academy for Educational Development in Washington, D.C. and a statistician for the University of California, San Francisco.
Her research and training experience includes projects at Johns Hopkins University, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Public Policy Institute of California, Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention, Yale University Health Services, and the UCSF Department of Neurology.
Torio received a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health and an M.P.H. from the Yale University, School of Public Health. She earned a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a member of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association, the American Society of Preventive Oncology, the Yale Alumni Association, the American Public Health Association, and the California Alumni Association.
Raised in San Francisco, she now resides in Princeton with her husband Francisco Celis, a computer engineer. She enjoys reading nonfiction, aerobics, and exergaming.