By Dirk Hoffman

Tirabassi, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine and a K12 Research Scholar in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, specialized in preventive health, lifestyle medicine and “food is medicine” initiatives.

According to her obituary, “she advocated fiercely for her patients and she believed in what she told them: that food, movement, and time outdoors were medicine.”

Tirabassi was passionate about food and lifestyle balance but knew that there were significant barriers to many people not being able to adopt the most optimal habits, according to Amanda M. Ziegler, PhD, MPH, a research assistant professor of family medicine who collaborated with her on research projects.

“She wanted to see that improved upon on the clinical side by getting more clinicians to share the importance of healthy lifestyle with their patients. But she also embodied it personally,” she says. “We are always trying to empower doctors and patients to have more conversations around food and nutrition.”

Lucia A. Leone, PhD, associate professor of community health and health behavior in UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, was also a co-investigator with Tirabassi on multiple research studies.

“Jill was like no other physician I had ever worked with before,” she says. “Most MDs who transition to research come in and want to immediately take the lead. They are used to being the boss and having everyone listen to them. Jill was different — she was there to learn and give back and was skilled at listening to everyone and making a clear-headed and practical decision based on all the evidence.”

Ziegler adds that Tirabassi had a unique way of handling difficult situations.

“She could distill it down and then find a way of saying what she needed to without being overly aggressive or mean. She was calculated and thoughtful.”

Tirabassi completed a preventive medicine residency at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She also completed the South Bend-Notre Dame Sports Medicine Fellowship and a family medicine residency at the University of Colorado. She earned her medical degree from SUNY Upstate Medical University.

When she first joined the Jacobs School in 2021, she was also involved in research on the benefits of physical activity.

A few years earlier, Tirabassi had contacted Leone while she was working on her MPH degree in Boston. She was looking for an adviser and a project to work on. At the time, Leone had a project with the YMCA to increase exercise enjoyment for women with obesity.

“Jill jumped in and helped bring additional measures to that project in terms of the data we were collecting, and it was also a really great addition to have a clinician’s perspective on the team,” Leone says.

“She was really interested in both the physical outcomes and the mental health outcomes.”

Leone says the study showed great mental health outcomes for the women who participated, in addition to increasing their exercise and producing some positive physical outcomes.

“I think that was really in line with some of the things that Jill was interested in,” she says. “Thinking about how parks, and green spaces, and exercise, can help improve both physical and mental health.”

The connection also proved to be the gateway for Tirabassi to come to Buffalo and start on the path to her faculty position at UB.

Leone, among others, served as her mentor for the K12 program, where junior faculty members receive National Institutes of Health-sponsored institutional funding.

Ziegler first met Tirabassi in 2020 when she was writing a publication and Leone’s team was mentoring her in some of the qualitative work.

“Through Lucia’s writing group, I met Jill. She gave me some really good advice on framing of eating behavior within the social ecological model for my first doctoral manuscript,” she says.

Leone and Tirabassi were co-principal investigators on a study where they worked with the Erie County Medical Center and its family medicine clinic to identify adults, 65 and older, who were food insecure or had trouble accessing fresh food.

Participants in the study were randomized to three different interventions, including a mobile market. Many food prescription programs at the time were focused on giving people a voucher to go to a mobile market to get food.

“Based on some of our previous experiences, we hypothesized that delivery would really be important for this population to overcome transportation needs and the stigma associated with different food prescription programs,” Leone says.

In addition to the mobile market at ECMC, the project also did two different programs to deliver food to people’s homes — one was a box of produce and the other was meal kits which included all the ingredients to make three meals a week — an example of how Tirabassi and her colleagues were always focused on keeping the research grounded on practical applications.

“Our goal with that study was to understand if we could increase redemption and usage of food prescriptions because the literature was showing that even when people got food prescriptions they were getting less than 20 percent of the full amount of food that they could,” Leone says.

The UB study showed that with its delivery conditions there was almost a 90 percent redemption rate.

“And people were actually using a good amount of the food — the dosage they were receiving of their prescription was much higher, so that they were actually cooking in their home 75 to 80 percent of all the food they could have gotten,” Leone adds.

In 2024, Ziegler started a partnership with the Health Sciences Charter School, which aimed to improve food literacy among Buffalo high school students and their families.

She was co-investigator with Tirabassi on the grant funded by UB’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s (CTSI) Community Partnership Development Seed Grant Program.

“My work is in adolescent eating behavior and autonomy development. In this work I take a lot of different vantage points, but I wanted to get in front of high school students to learn from them about what was most useful,” Ziegler says.

“Jill had a really wonderful, pragmatic clinical perspective about patient needs so we came together to work with the students to build hands-on food lessons that could help promote positive health behaviors and prevent disease. This project was community development work, so not explicitly a research project.”

Ziegler says they wanted to hear from students what they needed as far as food skills and food literacy — how to think through the food system and what hands-on learning they wanted to be doing in class.

“We found different ways to work with student leaders to develop and pilot some hands-on learning add-ons to engage students in nutrition class,” she says. “One of the areas that Jill led was on ultra-processed food, understanding the ultra-processed food spectrum.”

That work provided the basis for a research grant Ziegler was recently awarded, with senior research mentor Leone, from UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute to test some of the concepts.

“We are expanding on what we did before but are still working with student leaders to see what they want to learn. Then we are testing whether it has an impact on their skills now, their knowledge at home, as well as several clinical health outcomes.”

The work Tirabassi championed continues across UB and its community partnerships.

At the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus Sixth Annual Food as Medicine Symposium: Strategies for a Unified Approach to Lifestyle Medicine Oct. 15-16 at the Jacobs School, Leone will moderate a panel discussion on partnerships for implementing a novel pediatric food prescription program.

“I will be presenting a tribute to Jill and will also be talking about our study that we were doing with older adults and now we are doing the same thing but expanding it to families with children, aged 2-6, working with some pediatric practices this time,” she says.

Leone says she hopes a key takeaway that symposium attendees will leave with is that “it takes a village” to accomplish food prescription programs.

“We are aiming to teach the ‘nitty-gritty’ of how to design these types of programs and the logistics that go into them because I don’t think people understand how many moving parts there are,” Leone adds. “We want to be able to provide a roadmap for people who want to run similar-type programs.”

Leone also recently joined Stephanie Anzman-Frasca, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at the Jacobs School, to record a UB Medicine Podcast episode exploring the barriers families face in making healthy nutrition choices and the changes that can help make those choices more accessible. The episode is scheduled to air in December.

So as positive clinical outcomes are occurring and the robust food-is-medicine, preventive health, and lifestyle medicine research continues at UB, the legacy of Jill Tirabassi lives on.

While her colleagues acknowledge there is still much work to be done, they cannot help but feel she would be pleased with the progress made thus far.

“The one thing about Jill is she always thought about how the research was going to improve the health of patients,” says Laurene M. Tumiel-Berhalter, PhD, another one of Tirabassi’s K12 mentors, and director of community translational research in the Department of Family Medicine, and the CTSI’s director of community engagement.

“She thought about the practical aspects of the research that would facilitate providers’ ability to support patients making positive changes in their nutrition.”