CPC at 60: Barry Popkin reflects on a career built in partnership with the Carolina Population Center

By Grayson Mendenhall
gkm4unc@email.unc.edu

As the Carolina Population Center (CPC) celebrates its 60th anniversary, few researchers better illustrate the center’s impact than Dr. Barry Popkin, whose nearly five decades of scholarship helped shape global understanding of nutrition, maternal and child health, and population dynamics.

For Popkin, CPC was more than a research home. It was a catalyst for a career that would span 48 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, produce dozens of major research initiatives, secure decades of federal funding, and mentor generations of scholars around the world.

“First and foremost, CPC played a major role in my successes,” Popkin said. “At two points, it was the reason I stayed at UNC.”

Popkin joined CPC in 1978 during the first year of Director Richard Udry’s leadership. With a background in population studies from the University of Pennsylvania, he found a center uniquely aligned with his interdisciplinary approach to research.

“CPC perfectly fit my goals,” he recalled.

That early support helped launch collaborations that would shape the trajectory of his career. CPC provided summer stipends that enabled economists – and fellow CPC researchers – David Guilkey and John Akin to join his research team. Together, they secured a major grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration focused on evaluation research while simultaneously beginning a groundbreaking body of work on breastfeeding and its social, economic, and health determinants.

Those studies evolved into what became one of the most influential longitudinal health surveys in the developing world: the and Nutrition Survey in the Philippines. The project generated a series of National Institutes of Health R01 grants examining maternal health care utilization, infant feeding practices, infant mortality, postpartum fertility, and related topics. Over time, the survey grew into a long-running cohort study that continues to inform researchers today.

CPC’s investment in ambitious ideas extended beyond the Philippines.

Popkin credits a modest CPC pilot grant with helping launch the China Health and Nutrition Survey, a project that subsequently attracted more than 30 years of NIH funding and became one of the world’s leading studies of nutrition and health transition. CPC also helped support the creation of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, another landmark study that remains active.

“Throughout my 45-plus years with CPC, the core programs have been essential to me,” Popkin said.

From 1980 until his retirement in 2026, Popkin consistently managed two or three NIH grants simultaneously, a level of sustained research activity he says would have been impossible without CPC’s extensive infrastructure.

“The amazing administrative support from CPC” helped researchers on his team navigate grant submission, financial management, data collection, programming, computing support, and graphic services, he noted.

Not every ambitious vision reached fruition, but even unsuccessful proposals demonstrated CPC’s commitment to as they progressed through their reproductive years in an era of high birth rates as well as high infant and maternal mortality. Another effort, developed with World Health Organization support, proposed a $70 million, 12-country longitudinal study that would have collected biomarkers and repeated measures across diverse populations. The project came close to securing funding from NIH and a Kuwaiti foundation before geopolitical events disrupted the financing plan.

In each case, Popkin said, CPC researchers and staff played central roles in designing and advancing the work.

As his research portfolio expanded later in his career to include foundation funding alongside NIH grants, CPC continued adapting to support his evolving needs. The partnership became increasingly collaborative, with Popkin’s projects helping provide while the center continued offering the services necessary to sustain large-scale international research programs.

The results were extraordinary. By the end of his career, Popkin had earned numerous national and international honors for scholarship, service, and mentorship. He graduated 66 Ph.D. students, maintained decades of continuous research funding, and became one of the most highly cited nutrition scientists in the world.

When reflecting on those achievements, he places CPC at the center of the story.

“My success is so tied to the CPC,” he said. “CPC was central to my achievements.”

As the Carolina Population Center marks six decades of advancing population science, Popkin’s experience highlights a defining strength that has characterized the center since its founding: investing in people, ideas, and infrastructure that enable research with lasting impact across North Carolina and around the globe.

For researchers like Popkin, that support transformed promising ideas into studies that reshaped entire fields, demonstrating how CPC’s influence extends far beyond Chapel Hill and across generations of scientific discovery.