The CPC legacy: integration of biological and social perspectives on health

Linda Adair, PhD
The value of multidisciplinary and longitudinal approaches to maternal and child health
Linda Adair’s research focus has a strong life-course focus, spanning from explorations of determinants of birth outcomes, to infant feeding and child growth patterns to multidimensional pathways to healthy aging in adults. Her work has taken her from the Philippines (where she leads the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey), and China for the study of the emergence of cardiometabolic disease risk, to South Africa, Malawi, and Rwanda, where her work is focused on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD
Linking Environment, Biology, Behavior to Cardiometabolic Disease in Population Research
Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD, is professor and associate chair for research in the department of nutrition at UNC. For over 20 years her work has focused on obesity and its cardiometabolic disease complications, spanning genetics and the gut microbiome to behavior to environmental research. At the core of this work is the focus on the interplay between environment, biology, behavior and disease in relation to global population health.

Kathleen Mullan Harris, PhD
Social, Behavioral, and Biological Linkages in Health across the Life Course
Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at UNC. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family, the transition to adulthood, and social policy. She leads an integrative research program in Add Health to understand the social, environmental, behavioral, biological and genetic linkages in social stratification pathways that lead to health disparities across the life course.

Barry M. Popkin, PhD
An Economist’s Foray into Global Nutrition and related biomedical areas
Barry M. Popkin, PhD, is the W. R. Kenan, Jr. distinguished professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While initially his research work focused on the economics of women’s work and how time constraints were linked with major household health concerns, his long-term interests have focused on the study of the dynamic shifts in our environment as they affect dietary intake and physical activity patterns and trends and obesity and other nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases –all from a more social science economics perspective.