Notes on Contributors

Nancy E. Adler is professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, vice-chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and director of the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She helped found the Center for Obesity Assessment, Study and Treatment (COAST) at UCSF. Her early research examined the applicability of decision models to health behaviors, focusing primarily on reproductive health. More recently she has been examining mechanisms by which socioeconomic factors affect health, including the role of subjective social status. She directs the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. A social psychologist, she received her PhD from Harvard University.

Marice Ashe is the director of Public Health Law and Policy (PHLP), a nonprofit national technical assistance center offering public health leaders access to high-quality legal resources for public health campaigns related to both chronic and communicable disease control. She directs the National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her publications focus on cross-disciplinary legal and policy strategies to improve public health outcomes. She teaches public health law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, and received her MPH and JD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Desiree Backman is the deputy director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation, and previously, directed a California Department of Public Health initiative to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity and reduce chronic diseases. She has published numerous research articles on cancer prevention, health promotion, and public health intervention approaches and effects. Backman has served on many expert panels and workgroups at Loma Linda University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Cancer Institute, and Yale University. Her awards include the 2007 Joint Health, Fitness, and Nutrition Award from the California Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the National Association for Health and Fitness. Backman earned her DrPH from Loma Linda University.

Colleen L. Barry is an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Her research focuses on regulatory policy affecting stigmatized health conditions including obesity, mental health, and substance abuse. She is currently the principal investigator on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to study how messages used to frame the issue of childhood obesity affect public attitudes about regulation of food marketing. In other research, Barry studies the effects of behavioral health parity regulations and collaborates on a National Institute of Mental Health–funded study on the impact of the Food and Drug Administration regulatory policy on pediatric antidepressant use and suicide risk. Barry is the director of the health policy program within the Division of Health Policy and Administration and an affiliated faculty member at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. She received her PhD and MPP degrees from Harvard University.

Donald E. Benken is a senior public health analyst with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Public Health Law Program (PHLP). He has nearly twenty years of federal service with the CDC, where his work currently focuses on public health law, specifically, on legal issues that affect public health programs addressing chronic diseases and emergency preparedness. Prior to joining the PHLP, he served the CDC in the National Center for Environmental Health, the Financial Management Office for Legislative Affairs, and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion—Division of Adolescent and School Health. Trained as a community health educator at the University of Cincinnati, he also has an MPH from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health and a JD from the Georgia State University College of Law. He has been a member of the Georgia Bar since 1997.

Victoria L. Brescoll is assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management. Her research focuses on the impact of stereotypes on individuals’ status within organizations, particularly the status of individuals who violate gender stereotypes; the cultural origins of stereotypes (e.g. the media); corporate social responsibility; and persuasion and public policy. Brescoll was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, where she researched how to effectively frame obesity policy issues. Brescoll also worked as a legislative fellow, focusing on issues related to children and families, in the office of Senator Hillary Clinton. She holds a PhD.

Rochelle Brown is an instructor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She received her MD at the University of Kentucky and did her residency training at George Washington University. She completed a master’s of science in clinical investigation at New York University.

Kelly D. Brownell is professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, where he also serves as professor of epidemiology and public health and as director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He served as chair of the Department of Psychology at Yale from 2003 to 2006 and was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine in 2006. His work focuses on understanding and addressing the social, economic, legal, corporate, and political contributors to poor diet and obesity.

Frank J. Chaloupka is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), directs the UIC Health Policy Center, and holds appointments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Department of Economics and the School of Public Health’s Division of Health Policy and Administration. An economist, Chaloupka earned his BA from John Carroll University and his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Chaloupka’s research focuses on the effects of national, state, and local policies and other environmental influences on youth, young adult, and adult cigarette smoking; alcohol use; illicit drug use; physical activity; diet; and related outcomes.

Brian L. Cole is a researcher and project manager at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he specializes in health impact assessment and environmental approaches to physical activity promotion. He earned his master’s and doctorate in public health degrees from the UCLA School of Public Health.

Helen Darling is president of the National Business Group on Health, a national, nonprofit membership organization devoted exclusively to providing practical solutions to its employer-members’ most important health care problems and representing their perspective on national health policy issues. Its three hundred members, including sixty-four of the Fortune 100 of 2008, purchase health and disability benefits for over fifty million employees, retirees, and dependents. Previously, Darling purchased health benefits at Xerox Corporation for fifty-five thousand U.S. employees, plus their dependents and retirees. She worked in the U.S. Senate and at the Institute of Medicine. Darling received a master’s degree in demography/sociology from the University of Memphis.

William H. Dietz is director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a pediatrician and holds a doctorate in nutritional biochemistry. He has had a long-standing interest in the prevention and control of childhood obesity.

Karen Glanz is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education and Epidemiology, a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, and director of the Emory Prevention Research Center at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Glanz’s research addresses healthy environments and behaviors related to nutrition and obesity, skin cancer prevention, and cancer screening. Her scholarly contributions consist of more than 280 journal articles and book chapters and she was recognized in 2006 as a highly cited author by the Institute for Scientific Information, in the top 0.5 percent of authors in her field over a twenty-year period. She is a member of the federally appointed Task Force on Community Preventive Services and a fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Glanz holds a PhD and MPH.

Sonya A. Grier is an associate professor of marketing at the American University Kogod School of Business. Her research converges on topics related to the influence of social context on consumers, target marketing, the social impact of commercial marketing efforts, and social marketing. Her current research investigates the relationship between marketing activities and consumer health, with a focus on obesity. Grier has published her research in leading marketing, psychology, and health journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. She received her PhD in marketing, with a minor in social psychology, from Northwestern University in 1996. Grier also has an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

LuAnn Heinen is vice president of the National Business Group on Health, where she has directed the Institute on the Costs and Health Effects of Obesity since its inception in 2003. She works with large employers nationwide on health benefits and employee wellness programs and on policy initiatives such as patient safety. Heinen received an MPP from Harvard University.

Amy Hillier is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and a faculty co-director of the Cartographic Modeling Lab. Her research uses Geographic Information Systems and spatial analysis methods to identify and explain geographic disparities relating to housing and public health.

Alicia S. Hunter first joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2000 as an associate service fellow with the Office on Smoking and Health where she assisted the CDC in preparing for the U.S. lawsuit against the tobacco industry and in implementing federal guidelines around cigarette labeling and advertising. She completed a brief stint at the then National Center for Infectious Diseases before returning to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to serve on the obesity trailblazer team and the workplace health promotion team. In February of 2008 she joined the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, where she currently serves on the policy team providing technical assistance on public health law matters and participating in strategic alignment of the division’s medical care efforts.

Rogan Kersh is associate dean and associate professor of public service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he moved in 2006 from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy, during which time (1998–2000) he began writing about obesity and public policy, and more recently the first Distinguished Fellow at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He received a PhD in political science from Yale University.

Randolph S. Kline is a senior staff attorney at Public Health Law and Policy (PHLP), a nonprofit research and technical assistance center based in Oakland, California, where he specializes in product regulation, land use/zoning, enforcement, and First Amendment and marketing issues around public health. Prior to joining PHLP, Kline practiced litigation as an associate at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro in the life sciences and technology group and was a legal research attorney for the Honorable David A. Garcia in San Francisco Superior Court’s Law and Motion Department. He holds a JD from the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

William J. McCarthy is professor of public health and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has devoted thirty years to research on health-related lifestyle change including tobacco use, food choices, and physical activity. He served for eight years as principal evaluator for school-based tobacco use prevention programs in the state of California. He is currently involved in community-based efforts to reduce obesity risk by encouraging adherence to the high-satiety, high-nutrient, high-physical-activity lifestyle recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). McCarthy holds a PhD.

Marilyn S. Nanney is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health and the Program in Health Disparities Research at the University of Minnesota. Nanney is a registered dietitian with public health training in behavioral science and community health from the Saint Louis University School of Public Health. For the last ten years, her research has focused on obesity prevention through individual, family, organizational, and policy-level changes in community settings and partnering with various organizations including school districts and parenting, mentoring, tutoring, food insecurity, and faith-based programs.

Jennifer L. Pomeranz is the director of legal initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She received a JD from Cornell University Law School and a master’s of public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Pomeranz’s work is dedicated to finding innovative legal solutions to address such issues as obesity, food policy, marketing to children, health disparities, and weight bias and discrimination.

Lisa M. Powell is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy and a research associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Powell earned her BSc at the University of Toronto and a PhD in economics from Queen’s University. Powell has extensive experience as a health and labor economist in the empirical analysis of the effects of public policy on a series of behavioral outcomes. Powell’s current research examines the importance of economic factors, such as food prices and outlet density availability; school policies; and social influences on food consumption and physical activity behaviors and as determinants of obesity prevalence.

Lainie Rutkow is a senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her areas of academic interest include public health law and advocacy, injury prevention, the regulation of corporations and their public health impact, and food policy. She holds a JD and MPH.

James F. Sallis is professor of psychology at San Diego State University and director of Active Living Research, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His primary research interests are promoting physical activity and understanding policy and environmental influences on physical activity and nutrition. He is the author of over four hundred scientific publications and has been identified as one of the world’s most cited authors in the social sciences.

Mark Schlesinger is professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University; he is former editor of the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law. Schlesinger’s research explores the determinants of public opinion about health and social policy, the influence of bounded rationality on medical consumers, and the consequences of for-profit organizations in American medicine. His recent research initiatives include explaining the rapid expansion in the scope of newborn screening among the American states, the extent and public perceptions of economic insecurity, and the sources of perceived legitimacy for collective responses to the spread of obesity. His favored sports include uncompetitive volleyball and unlit table tennis.

Marlene B. Schwartz is deputy director and senior research scientist at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She is a clinical psychologist and received her PhD from Yale University in 1996. Her current research examines the evaluation and impact of local school wellness policies, the influence of the child care environment on children’s nutrition and physical activity, the influence of the Women, Infants, and Children program on healthy food availability in low-income neighborhoods, and how to reduce the harm of food marketing to children. Her work is funded by the Rudd Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Judith Stewart is the administrator for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health at the University of California, San Francisco. She maintains a clinical psychology private practice and is an adjunct clinical instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a co-editor of the 1999 volume Socioeconomic Status and Health in Industrial Nations: Social, Psychological and Biological Pathways (the New York Academy of Sciences) and of the 2007 publication Reaching for a Healthier Life: Facts on Socioeconomic Status and Health in the U.S. (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health). She holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and an interdisciplinary MPH from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mary Story is a professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Story has a PhD in nutrition, and her research interests focus on obesity prevention and eating behavior of children and adolescents and on school, community, and environmental interventions to improve healthy eating, physical activity, and obesity prevention for youth and families, particularly low-income populations. Story is the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–funded Healthy Eating Research program, focused on environmental and policy research to reduce childhood obesity.

Stephen D. Sugarman is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include Torts Stories (Foundation Press 2003), Regulating Tobacco (Oxford University Press 2001), and Smoking Policy (Oxford University Press 1993). He is advisory board chair of the National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Sugarman received a BS and a JD from Northwestern University.

Stephen P. Teret is associate dean for faculty and education and professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). He also directs the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at JHSPH. His work focuses on the use of the law as a tool for protecting and enhancing the health of populations. He holds a JD and an MPH.

Kenneth E. Warner is dean and Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network. He has been on the school’s faculty since 1972. An economist, Warner has focused his research on the impacts of tobacco policies. Recently he served as the World Bank’s representative to negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world’s first-ever global health treaty. Warner was a founding member of the board of directors of the American Legacy Foundation and served as president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in 2004–2005.

Jerome D. Williams is the F.J. Heyne Centennial Professor in Communication in the Department of Advertising at the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment in the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. He received his PhD in marketing and social psychology from the University of Colorado, his MS in industrial administration from Union College, and his BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee that authored the report on food marketing to children, which was requested by the U.S. Congress and sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Antronette (Toni) K. Yancey is professor of public health and co-director of the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities at the University of California, Los Angeles. She spent five years in public health practice as director of public health in Richmond, VA, and director of chronic disease prevention and health promotion in Los Angeles County. Yancey has authored more than one hundred scientific publications, including more than seventy refereed journal articles and editorials. She serves on many federal advisory and review committees and chairs the board of directors of the Public Health Institute. Yancey completed her undergraduate studies in biochemistry at Northwestern University and her MD at Duke University. She is also a public health commentator on local NPR affiliate KPCC and a published poet/spoken word artist.