The food science and human nutrition department received a grant this semester to allow students in dietetics to study international nutrition abroad during the summer.

Grace Marquis, assistant professor of food science and human nutrition, along with 20 other students, will travel to Peru this summer to study nutrition thanks to a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for fair education received in September.

Marquis and Mary Jane Oakland, associate professor of food science and human nutrition, decided to use the money for a study-abroad program that would work for dietetics students.

If an ISU dietetics student were to take a semester off to study abroad, “it would have set their graduation date back,” Oakland said.

The study abroad in Peru this summer will be a “four-week intensive course on international nutrition carried out at the Nutrition Research Institute,” Marquis said. While the students are abroad, they will earn four credits and get the “hands-on experience and learn things that courses can’t teach you at Iowa State.”

The Nutrition Research Institute’s work is “well-known around the world and it gives students access to people working in the [nutrition] area for more than 20 years,” Oakland said.

Along with ISU students, she said she is hopeful there will be “a congruence of backgrounds of students” on the trip. Oakland said students enrolled at other U.S. universities also are welcome to apply.

Marquis said they ask that the students “have completed their sophomore year in life sciences or that they demonstrate an interest in nutrition and dietetics.”

While at the Nutrition Research Institute in Lima, Peru, students will have to choose two “modules,” or areas of interest, they are most interested in and will concentrate on them for the entire four weeks, Marquis said. The choices for the modules are community and nutrition education, clinical nutrition, water and food safety, food assistance programs and community-based research, she said.

Iowa State will offer this summer course for at least the three years the grant will last, but, Marquis said, “Hopefully it will become a permanent offering.”

Oakland said she is hopeful that they can possibly expand the areas of research in the coming years.

“Students who get the change to study abroad say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I’m glad the dietetic students will be able to experience it,” she said. “I think the students will come back and ask questions about our own problems here.”