Sofia Rivera, MS, RD
Research Associate
Sofia Rivera coordinates the Initiative's reference-meal protocols and weighed-food data collection. Her background combines clinical dietetics with nutritional epidemiology field methods, and she contributes to the Initiative's methodology briefs on USDA FoodData Central usage and on portion-estimation protocols.
Areas of work: Weighed-food protocols; USDA FoodData Central; Field data collection; Clinical dietetics
Joined the Initiative: 2024-04
ORCID: 0000-0002-9956-3074
Publications
- Independent validation of six commercial AI-assisted dietary assessment applications against weighed-food reference: a 180-meal cross-sectional study (2026)
- Manual-entry food databases: a quality and provenance audit of five major consumer applications (2026)
- What level of dietary assessment accuracy supports patient self-monitoring? A position paper (2026)
- A protocol for weighed-food reference meal construction: scale calibration, ingredient decomposition, and ground-truth lookup (2025)
- Independent validation of image-based dietary assessment applications: a systematic review and meta-analysis (2018-2024) (2025)
- USDA FoodData Central as a reference standard for dietary assessment validation: versioning, scope, and known limitations (2024)
Preprints
- Protocol: prospective validation of dietary assessment applications in a clinical type-2 diabetes cohort (DAI-VAL-2026-02) (2026)
- Extending the weighed-food reference meal set to restaurant-served meals: protocol and pilot data (2026)
- Within-application accuracy gaps between manual-entry and photo-based modes in a single dietary tracking application: a focused replication (2026)
Methodology briefs
- Re-rating concordance protocol: blinded sub-sample re-evaluation for single-rater validation studies (2025)
- IRB / ethics approval considerations for weighed-food and image-based dietary assessment studies (2025)
- Kitchen-scale calibration for weighed-food reference protocols: a checklist (2025)
- USDA FoodData Central: when to use Foundation Foods vs. Survey (FNDDS) vs. SR Legacy entries (2024)