Nutrition Intervention Centre

The Nutrition Intervention Centre (NIC) is a space for human nutrition research within the Department of Nutritional Sciences, located on the second floor of the C. David Naylor Building on the University of Toronto’s St. George campus. The Centre opened in January 2020, with funding from the Dean’s office and the NSERC Program in Food Safety, Nutrition and Regulatory Affairs , and equipment purchases through a successful Canadian Foundation for Innovation-John R. Evans Leaders Fund submission.

The NIC is a fully functional facility designed to support a broad range of observational and experimental human nutrition studies across the lifespan. It serves as a hub for a collaborative network of researchers and primary and tertiary care scholars working toward the prevention of disease trajectories through early and sustained nutrition intervention. The Centre also provides opportunities for community engagement, outreach, and integration of government nutrition initiatives, strengthening the connection between research, practice, and policy.

The NIC is equipped to support diverse human nutrition research activities, including a fully functional metabolic kitchen; dedicated biospecimen collection and processing rooms; and a camera- and audio-equipped simulated living space for investigating parenting practices and feeding behaviours. The facility also houses a metabolic cart, stadiometers and other anthropometric equipment, air-displacement plethysmography systems for body composition assessment (BOD POD and PeaPod), an InBody body composition analyser, an ultrasound system, and other state-of-the-art research equipment.

Strategic Development and Role within DNS

The development of the NIC represents the culmination of decades of leadership in nutritional science research within DNS, together with extensive consultation, planning, and institutional support. Its development was informed by site visits to leading national and international nutrition research centres, including Laval, McGill, Manitoba, and Rutgers, and shaped through an iterative planning process. The Centre was subsequently embedded within the DNS Strategic Plan and reinforced through the Department’s external review process.

The NIC forms a central component of DNS’s broader strategy to bring together the three complementary pillars of nutrition research:

• Human intervention and clinical research
• Wet-laboratory biomedical and mechanistic research
• Dry-laboratory policy, population health, and epidemiological research

The establishment of the NIC, alongside the Department’s broader research infrastructure, strengthens the integration of these research approaches and creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration across the nutrition research continuum.

The location and development of the Centre were also informed by an extensive review of potential sites, including MARS, St. Michael’s Hospital, the Medical Sciences Building, and the Naylor Building. The Naylor Building was ultimately endorsed by university leadership as the most appropriate and sustainable location for this research infrastructure.

Looking ahead, the NIC is positioned as a cornerstone of DNS’s future research, policy impact, community engagement, and experiential training. By providing specialized infrastructure for human nutrition research within an integrated departmental research environment, the Centre supports DNS’s commitment to translational, community-engaged, and policy-relevant health research and to training the next generation of nutrition scientists.