Penny Gordon-Larsen
Ph.D., Associate Professor,
Nutrition
Dr. Gordon-Larsen's Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Gordon-Larsen's Personal Home Page
CPC Office: 400-B CPC East
CPC Phone Number: (919) 843-9966
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Email: pglarsen@unc.edu
Penny Gordon-Larsen is an Associate Professor of Nutrition. A human biologist by training, Gordon-Larsen's research integrates biological, behavioral, and environmental factors to study population issues related to population diversity and inequality. Her research uses trans-disciplinary, multilevel and pathway-based approaches to answer questions about the roles of biological, behavioral, and environmental factors that shape obesity and its consequences. She has three lines of NIH funded research. First, she is working with longitudinal data on US adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and, separately, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study, using data she and colleagues have created on social, demographic, economic, and built environment factors from secondary sources that have been temporally and geographically linked to CARDIA and Add Health respondents' residential addresses. This work has identified several physical and social neighborhood factors that influence race/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in obesity, obesity-related behaviors, and obesity-related consequences. In this work, she is collaborating with CPC fellows David Guilkey and Barry Popkin, that use a structural equations modeling approach to measure the impact of physical activity on obesity, and ultimately cardiometabolic health, taking into account residential selectivity bias. In a second line of research, Gordon-Larsen is collaborating with CPC fellow Linda Adair and other UNC researchers to investigate genetic variants that influence trajectories of weight gain across diverse populations and across different lifecycle periods. This work focuses on the role of gene-environment interactions and weight gain in an effort to understand differential susceptibility to weight gain and the environmental circumstances in which individuals are most at risk. Third, Gordon-Larsen is collaborating with CPC fellows Linda Adair, Amy Herring, Barry Popkin, and Amanda Thompson to use population-based data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) to investigate how rapid modernization and environmental change over the past 20 years has influenced disease risk over the lifecycle. The team will use sophisticated statistical models for pathway-based analyses addressing each piece of the complex system to investigate links between environments, behavior and weight with cardiometabolic risk over time. Her published research has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Demography, Social Science & Medicine among others. Dr. Gordon-Larsen is an associate editor of Health and Place and International Journal of Pediatric Obesity and is on the editorial boards of Obesity, Annals of Human Biology and Nutrition and Diabetes. She received the Eli Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from The Obesity Society in 2010.
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Information updated on 2/11/2013
