Catherine Viator

Catherine Viator is an expert in food safety and regulations in the food and agriculture industry. She has an academic background in economics and specializes in conducting industry-focused surveys, program evaluations, literature reviews, and regulatory cost-benefit analyses.

Ms. Viator is a certified Project Management Professional. She is skilled in primary data collection through industry surveys, expert panels, and individual interviews, handling projects from design through execution. Since joining RTI in 2001, she has contributed to many key projects for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and various public health agencies over the years. She was the project director for the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service’s Industry Surveys, a series of establishment-level surveys of the meat, poultry, and egg industries.

More recently, Ms. Viator has led listening sessions with key stakeholders to inform the development of a new Safe Handling Instructions label for raw meat and poultry. Also for USDA FSIS, she led a systematic literature review on best practices regarding public health communication campaigns and associated behavioral changes, and is now writing the final report for the Year 5 observational kitchen study. For a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study, she conducted more than 75 interviews with grocery workers about their experiences as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also serves as project manager on a multi-year evaluation of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities (AHC) Model.