Professor Gretel Pelto is a Graduate Professor (retired from active teaching) in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. She received her BA in sociology, MA and Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Minnesota. She is internationally recognized for her work on bridging the interface between academic research and actions to improve nutrition and public health in communities. The interaction between theory and practice brings social science methods, particularly those of ethnography, to bear on nutrition and child health research, with an emphasis on infant and young child nutrition.

She began her teaching career in the Department of Nutritional Science at The University of Connecticut, where she developed nutritional anthropology as an academic research area and helped to build the theoretical and organizational foundations for this emerging field.  She has written and edited four books on the field, and numerous articles on theoretical and empirical issues, often addressed to the academic nutrition community.  Her initial field research was in Mexico (including a major project in the 1980s under the auspices of the Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP), and later in other parts of Latin America. She has also worked in Finland carrying out research on dietary change with support from a Fulbright grant. In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki, in recognition of this work and contributions to the development of nutrition research and teaching.

Professor Pelto’s experience led to her appointment at the World Health Organization (WHO) where she served for 8 years as the senior social scientist responsible for creating research tools and implementing their application to improve household management of acute respiratory infection and diarrheal diseases in developing countries. In addition to addressing family care-seeking behavior, she also worked on improving health worker communication skills and the organization of health services to support skill development.  In 2007 she received the Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, which is given "to an outstanding social scientist in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies and who has actively pursued the goal of solving human problems using the concepts and tools of social science." She is also a Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition and the Society for Applied Anthropology.

She was a founding editor of the journals, Medical Anthropology, and Reviews in Anthropology, which was established to further the quality in publishing of academic anthropological research. To provide a forum for nutritional anthropology she worked with colleagues to establish a group within the Society for Medical Anthropology, which is now an independent organization (The Society for Food and Nutrition) that operates under the umbrella of the American Anthropological Association. She currently serves on the editorial board of several nutrition and health journals.