Lauren Tobias ’12
Lauren Tobias ’12 spent four years as the wellness director at Fort Peck Community College on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux Nations in Montana. Through this role, she managed a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant project for the tribes’ local community college to build a diabetes prevention program, primarily through the implementation of a one-year, evidence-based curriculum, and by promoting access to more culturally based food sources, such as buffalo that were reintroduced to the reservation over 20 years ago.
The CDC’s Good Health and Wellness in Indian Country (GHWIC) grant program, which
has awarded millions of dollars to tribal-affiliated organizations across the United
States, is the CDC’s largest investment to address the disproportionate rate of type
2 diabetes affecting American Indian and Alaska natives today. The college was awarded
$1.9 million over five years (2019-2024), and Tobias continues to manage the grant
as a consultant. The first cohort is moving through the one-year program, with a second
group to follow this fall.
Native Americans have a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes than any other racial group in the United States, according to the CDC. “Type 2 diabetes in Indian Country is rooted in colonization and western settlement, as tribes in the late 1800s were forced onto reservations without access to their traditional food sources and made dependent on rations consisting largely of simple sugars (flour, sugar, salt, lard, and alcohol),” Tobias says.
“This contributed significantly to the high-caloric diet that replaced hunting buffalo and eating off the land in other ways,” she adds. “The effects of this rapid diet change persist today.”
Tobias, a psychology major from New City, N.Y., was strongly influenced by her Skidmore field hockey team and maintains close ties with many of her former teammates. She was a Liberty League All-Academic Team member, and in 2010, her team broke records with an unprecedented 19-game winning streak, making it to the NCAA Final Four. The 2010 team was inducted into the Skidmore Athletics Hall of Fame in 2017. The hockey team and other Skidmore experiences continue to impact her career trajectory.
She says, “The athletic environment at Skidmore gave me a passion for positive habits and healthy living, which has led me to the career path that I’m on now.”
