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Dr. Barry Popkin is the Carla Smith Chambliss Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition and director of the Interdisciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina. He conducts global research on the nutrition transition, trends in dietary intake, physical activity, and body composition. He is an economist and large population nutrition epidemiology scholar specializing in the study of the determinants and consequences of nutritional, health, and demographic behaviors and their interrelationships. Dr. Popkin has a special interest in the way environmental factors -- interacting with demographic, social, and economic factors -- affect dietary, physical activity, and body composition (a main focus on obesity) patterns and trends.

Dr. Popkin has an active research program in the United States, including a series of longitudinal studies on environmental and economic factors affecting adolescent and young adult dietary, physical activity, and obesity patterns. Included is a focus on understanding some of the causes of economic and race-ethnic disparities. His international research on the nutrition transition includes a series of comparative and longitudinal studies of obesity, dietary, and physical activity patterns and their causes. This global research includes detailed longitudinal studies that he directs in China and Russia, active involvement with longitudinal studies in the Philippines, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and Brazil, and related work in a number of other countries. Dr. Popkin initiated and directed the China Health and Nutrition Survey, a longitudinal study of 19,000 (with nationwide surveys in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2011), the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring survey (with 14 nationally representative surveys from 1992 to 2008), and the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. He is the author of over 275 refereed journal articles and has a book The World Is Fat (Penguin, 2008).

Dr. Popkin earned his doctoral degree in economics from Cornell University in 1974.