Meet Mary Flynn

Mary M. Flynn, PhD, RD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. She taught three courses in nutrition (Principles of Nutrition, Diet and Chronic Diseases, and Nutrition for Fitness and Physical Activity) at Brown University from 1998 to 2023. She has provided lectures on nutrition at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University since 1994, both in the curriculum and in medical school clinical electives. She was the Director of the Outpatient Metabolic Kitchen at The Miriam Hospital from 1984 until the unit closed in 1994. She was the outpatient dietitian for oncology from 2007 through 2025. From 1999 until she retired in December 2025, she was a Senior Research Scientist at TMH.

Her main research interest was how food can be used as medicine and her main food of interest was extra virgin olive oil which she has been researching since 1999. She developed a plant-based, olive oil diet in 1999, which she has used in her research for weight loss in oncology patients and improving food insecurity in food pantry clients and medical students at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

Flynn is an internationally recognized expert of the health benefits of extra virgin olive and has lectured on the topic for both professional and layperson audiences in the US, Australia, Spain, Greece, and Italy. ​ In March 2026, she became a nutrition consultant for Cobram Estates olive oil. In her spare time, she loves to bake and garden.