Ashley Chaifetz designs and leads interdisciplinary multi-year research as a Senior Analyst at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, mostly concentrated on school meals. Within the federal Child Nutrition programs, her work includes student participation, nutritional characteristics of school meals, menu characteristics, the school food environment, farm to school, procurement and school meal costs, and the food supply chain. Previously, she was an Agricultural Marketing Specialist at the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, where her work was centered on local and regional food systems (LRFS) resilience, food safety, data standardization, and the improvement of data collection and analysis by LRFS stakeholders. Overall, she examines the inequality of goods available to and demanded by socioeconomically diverse communities. She completed her Ph.D. in public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.