Loyola Marymount University’s 2025 Interdisciplinary Research Symposium highlighted two innovative projects: an AI-based app for diet quality and intuitive eating, now available on the Apple App Store, and mathematical modeling research on epidemic outcomes for disadvantaged populations. The latter gained global attention after being presented at the 16th Annual Conference on Dynamical Systems Applied to Biology and Natural Sciences in Italy.
Hosted by the LMU Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering on March 11, the symposium featured two research teams awarded $50,000 each in seed grant funds to address societal challenges through interdisciplinary STEM collaborations.
Principal investigator Mandy Korpusik, assistant professor of computer science, leads the research titled In2Eat: AI-Based Food Recommendations for Improved Diet Quality and Intuitive Eating. The team’s co-investigators include Hawley Almstedt, professor of health and human sciences, Delaram Yazdansepas, assistant professor of computer science, and a team of student researchers representing both disciplines. “The development of this intuitive eating mobile application is aiding in the investigation as to whether intuitive eating principles can improve diet quality, especially for LMU students experiencing food insecurity,” said Korpusik. “Current research shows that nearly 30 percent of university students in the U.S. experience food insecurity and diet quality decreases with food insecurity.”
The In2Eat app aims to make intuitive eating accessible to users by providing personalized tools to improve diet quality, guide food choices, and offer nutritional analysis. Intuitive eating empowers individuals to make food choices based on bodily needs rather than external pressures or rigid rules. The ongoing user study, involving 48 participants, assesses baseline and four-week post usage outcomes related to intuitive eating, disordered eating, perceived wellness, psychological distress, diet quality, food insecurity, nutrient intake, and antioxidant levels in the skin.
“Our next steps include development and integration of an activity tracker with the goal of promoting intuitive eating in a more holistic way by considering food intake paired with activity,” said Korpusik. “The process will involve gathering and cleaning data, looking for meaningful data through analysis, and studying the correlation of activity trends to the food intake of users. Future work also includes looking at integration of computer vision and personalized, AI-based health-aware food recommendations, as well as seeking additional funding through a National Institutes of Health grant.”
The second research project led by principal investigator Ben Fitzpatrick, professor of mathematics, is titled Modeling the Disparate Impact of Epidemics on Disadvantaged Populations. The team’s co-investigators include Yanping Ma, professor of mathematics and Christopher Cappelli, assistant professor of health and human sciences. “This investigation is an attempt to understand how both public health messaging [a form of cues to action in the Health Belief Model or HBM] and negative messaging impact the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions that decrease the likelihood of disease spread, especially the differential impacts that arise from socioeconomic differences,” said Fitzpatrick.
This interdisciplinary project focuses on integrating models of human behavior and epidemic dynamics to explore how different subgroups in a population may respond to public health initiatives. In particular, the team employs components of the Health Belief Model, a widely used conceptual framework for understanding health behaviors, into the commonly used SIR (susceptible-infected-removed) mathematical model of epidemic dynamics. The investigators further structure the population in terms of socioeconomic status variables to examine the impact of disparities on disease spread.
The investigators hope their work can 1) inform empirical research concerning the type of data needed to design and evaluate interventions, and 2) guide policymakers on the nature of interventions that might have the highest likelihood of mitigating epidemics. “Research has shown that minoritized communities have endured disproportionate impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Fitzpatrick. “The models we are developing can help decision-makers understand how to improve public health messaging in ways that reduce these disparities.”
LMU Seaver College’s Interdisciplinary Project Seed Grants foster cross-disciplinary collaborations to address societal challenges. The grants provide funding and student research support, enabling teams to develop impactful solutions.
