Nutrient Profiling System Development Intern
Edacious
Marlborough, MA, USA
Posted on Jul 10, 2025
Join us in reshaping how food is measured for health! Edacious is developing a cutting-edge Nutrient Profiling System to evaluate the nutritional quality of foods based on a comprehensive suite of attributes — expanding upon current models to evaluate healthfulness with a focus on nutrient density.
We are seeking an Intern to support our research and development team in refining and applying our nutrient profiling algorithm. This work sits at the intersection of nutrition science, data analytics, and public health communication.
The Edacious Nutrient Profiling System (E.NPS) is designed to:
1) Quantify nutritional quality using advanced measurements, including micronutrients, specific fatty acids, protein quality, phytochemicals, and bioavailability.
2) Differentiate between similar foods based on nutrient richness—especially where agricultural practices, genetics, or variety impact nutrient composition.
3) Expand upon systems like Food Compass and Nutrient Rich Food Index by incorporating more nuanced attributes and enhancing differentiation among unprocessed whole foods.
We are building and testing the E.NPS algorithm across multiple domains and attributes, with plans for validation using existing databases and custom datasets.
Key Responsibilities
- Assist with data curation of attributes such as processing, food ingredients, phytochemicals, etc. from publicly available datasets
- Assist with data wrangling, cleaning, and transformation of nutrient composition datasets.
- Support modeling and testing of scoring algorithms in R.
- Conduct literature reviews and evidence synthesis for nutrients and scoring attributes.
- Contribute to documentation and data visualization for scientific and public audiences.
- Support comparative validation evaluation against existing, validated NPS
- Support product design team in iterating on the user interface and experience for nutrient profiling
Preferred Qualifications
- Proficiency in R for data analysis and visualization (e.g., tidyverse, ggplot2, dplyr).
- Familiarity with using Git for version control.
- Experience working with food or dietary composition data (e.g., USDA, NHANES, EFSA, scientific literature).
- Background in nutrition science, public health, or a related field.
- Interest or experience in nutrient profiling, nutrition education, or science communication.
If you’re passionate about nutrition data and want to apply your skills to help create more meaningful tools for farmers, eaters, and policymakers, we’d love to hear from you.