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Planning Committee Biographical Sketches
Patricia B. Crawford, Dr.P.H., R.D. (Chair), is director of the Atkins Center for Weight and Health, Cooperative Extension Nutrition Specialist in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, and adjunct professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Crawford directed the 10-year longitudinal National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Growth & Health Study, a study of the development of cardiovascular risk factors in African-American and white girls, as well as the Five-State Fit WIC Initiative to Prevent Pediatric Overweight. Her current studies include evaluations of large community-based obesity initiatives and school-based policy interventions. Dr. Crawford chaired the Institute of Medicine (IOM) planning committee for a series of workshops on community perspectives to prevent childhood obesity; she is a member of the IOM Standing Committee on Childhood Obesity Prevention and the IOM Committee on Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention. She earned a B.S. from the University of Washington and a doctorate in public health and an R.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Katherine Alaimo, Ph.D., M.S., is associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Michigan State University. She has also worked on nutrition and food insecurity issues in the Division of Health Examination Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her primary research interests are hunger and its consequences for children; community food security; urban agriculture, community gardens, and school gardens; promoting healthful eating and physical activity through policies, programs, and community design; and
community-based participatory research. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from Cornell University.
Mariana Chilton, Ph.D., M.P.H., is associate professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health. She is the principal investigator (PI) for the Philadelphia GROW Project, a nutrition and growth initiative for children and their families, and co-PI of Children’s HealthWatch. She most recently launched Witness to Hunger to increase women’s participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty. Her work spans a variety of issues that affect low-income families to address nutritional well-being, public assistance participation, housing instability, and employment. She has held positions at the Hahnemann School of Public Health and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Her awards include the Young Professional Award in Maternal and Child Health from the American Public Health Association, the Philadelphia Business Journal “40 Under 40” Young Professional Award, and the National Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Chilton received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Oklahoma.
Adam Drewnowski, Ph.D., M.A., is director of the Nutritional Sciences Program, professor of epidemiology, and adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. He also serves as director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition and the UW Center for Obesity Research and is a joint member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, he served on the faculty of the Rockefeller University and the University of Michigan, where he became professor of public health, psychology, and psychiatry and director of the Program in Human Nutrition at the School of Public Health. His current research focuses on the relationship between poverty and obesity, the links between obesity and diabetes rates in vulnerable populations, and access to healthful foods. He is a member of the IOM Standing Committee on Childhood Obesity Prevention and served on the IOM Planning Committee for a Workshop on Perspectives from United Kingdom and United States Policy Makers on Obesity Prevention. Dr. Drewnowski received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Rockefeller University in New York and his M.A. in biochemistry from Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
Edward A. Frongillo, Jr., Ph.D., M.S., is professor and chair of the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Dr. Frongillo studies how to solve under- and overnutrition of populations
globally, especially children and families living in poverty, using qualitative and quantitative methods. His particular research interests are growth, development, and feeding of infants and young children and the role of family stress and parenting in these areas; measurement and consequences of household food insecurity and hunger; policies and programs for improving nutrition and development; advancement of consensus, commitment, and capacity for nutrition and health in poor locations; and design and analysis of longitudinal studies. Dr. Frongillo received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Cornell University.
Christine M. Olson, Ph.D., is professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. Prior to her current position, she was division extension leader in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, director of nutrition graduate studies, and assistant dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell and visiting faculty at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Olson has a long history of research on maternal and early-childhood nutrition, including food insecurity. She is currently completing a long-term, longitudinal research project on food insecurity in rural low-income families; the focus this year is on factors that facilitate and inhibit families from moving out of food insecurity across time. She has served on the IOM Committee on Nutritional Status During Pregnancy and Lactation and its Subcommittee on Clinical Application Guide. Dr. Olson received her Ph.D. and M.S., both in nutrition sciences, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Mary Story, Ph.D., R.D., is professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, associate dean for student life and leadership in the School of Public Health, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Pediatrics School of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is director of the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating Research program, which supports research on environmental and policy strategies to promote healthful eating among children to prevent childhood obesity. Dr. Story’s interests are in the area of child and adolescent nutrition and childhood obesity prevention. She has conducted numerous school- and community-based obesity prevention studies and has been PI on several National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. She has numerous scientific publications on child nutrition and obesity prevention. Dr. Story was a member of the IOM Committee on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth, Committee on Nutrition Standards for Foods in Schools, and Committee on Childhood Obesity Prevention Actions for Local Governments; she is currently on the IOM Standing Committee for Childhood Obesity Prevention and the Committee on Examination of
Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols. She has received numerous awards for her research and work in the field of child and adolescent nutrition. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2010. She received her Ph.D. in nutrition science from Florida State University.
Amy Yaroch, Ph.D., is executive director of the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Yaroch also holds an appointment as professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Social and Behavioral Health, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center. Her research areas include obesity prevention in youth, local food systems and health, survey development and evaluation, and health disparities. She has served as a behavioral scientist, program director, and program officer at the National Cancer Institute and as an assistant scientist at the AMC Cancer Research Center in Denver, Colorado. She is on the board of directors of the Nebraska Food Cooperative and is vice chair of the board of directors of Slow Food-Omaha. She has received a number of awards for her work at the National Institutes of Health. Professional activities include membership in the American Academy of Health Behavior, American Dietetic Association, Society of Behavior Medicine, American Public Health Association, and Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. She received her Ph.D. in nutrition and health sciences from Emory University.