Christina Vollbrecht

Ms. Vollbrecht has split her career teaching in higher education and cooking professionally. She is currently a program manager and adjunct faculty at MUIH focusing on community outreach and supporting food access and health behavior change. Ms. Vollbrecht holds a clinical role at the University of Vermont Medical Center.

Ms. Vollbrecht is trained in critical theory and uses this approach in teaching and training public health educators. She is passionate about bringing individual agency and self-efficacy back into our health conversations, especially related to food and herbs as medicine.

Ms. Vollbrecht earned her Bachelor of Arts in History from Roanoke College which led her to work and live in Slovakia and the Czech Republic studying post-war modern Europe. Here she taught English at the Comenius University of Bratislava while earning her Master of Sociology at the Masaryk University of Brno, focusing on discourse analysis, critical theory, and the commodification of higher education. She then moved to Washington DC, working in fine dining kitchens and eventually scoring a Michelin star as a sous-chef at Siren by RW. Restaurant experience strengthened her resolve to work towards more sustainable food systems and focus on the healing possibility of foods, leading her to a Master of Nutrition and Integrative Health degree at MUIH.

Since then, Ms. Vollbrecht has been working on expanding the University’s outreach programming to make nutrition education, culinary skills, and delicious healthy food more accessible. Ms. Vollbrecht is involved in projects in and outside of the University associated with advancing individual health agency, increasing food access, expanding culinary and nutrition literacy, and investing in restorative agriculture to strengthen equitable and local food systems.