Amy Block Joy

Amy Block Joy is an Emerita Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is best known for exposing fraudulent activity in a California nutrition education program. She specializes in nutrition and health disparities of diverse populations, nutritional ecology, and ethics. She is an author and advocate for whistleblowers and employee rights. Joy was formerly a Cooperative Extension Specialist, Emeritus at the University of California, Davis

Career Amy Block Joy earned a bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and Bacteriology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979.

Upon her return to the US, she joined the University of California, Davis faculty in the Department of Nutrition.

She was reassigned to a one-woman department, Nutritional Ecology, exploring topics including nutritional controversy, health impacts on the environment, nutritional policies, and food safety.

Whistleblower report In August 2006, Joy filed a whistleblower report over fraudulent activities within the UC Food Stamp Nutrition Education Program. UC Davis reached a settlement with Joy over retaliation for whistleblowing, paying her $89,611. As a result, the California Department of Social Services withheld $2.3 million in funding from UC Davis and the program's participating counties, The retaliation included trying to scapegoat Joy for the incident.

In 2010, she received a settlement from UC Davis. She has since published several books on her experience, including Whistleblower published in 2010 by Bay Tree Press, in addition to two further self-published works. The Routledge edited volume Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy called her experience “one of the most well-known cases of whistleblowing in academia”.

Published work In 1985, she published "California EFNEP Evaluation Study" at Berkeley. It was the first experimentally-designed study of the effectiveness of nutrition education and discussed in the book New Directions for Evaluation.

In 2006, she published the first cost-benefit analysis to measure cost effectiveness of nutrition education in California. The analysis is discussed in the 2016 version of Community Health Nursing: Caring for the Public's Health.

Joy has authored three books about her whistleblower experience: Whistleblower (Bay Tree Publishing, ) Retaliation (self-published by CreateSpace, ) Blowback: The Unintended Consequences of Exposing a Fraud (self-published by CreateSpace, )

She began writing books in order to educate future whistleblowers.