Barry Popkin
| Barry Michael Popkin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1944 (age 72–73) Superior, Wisconsin |
| Fields | Economics, nutrition epidemiology |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Alma mater | Cornell University, University of Wisconsin |
| Thesis | Vitamin A deficiency in the Philippines : the development and analysis of alternative interventions (1974) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Call, Michael Latham |
| Other academic advisors | Ralph Andreano, Lee Hansen, Richard Easterlin, David Call, Daniel Sisler |
| Known for | Nutrition transition |
| Spouse | Anne-Linda Furstenberg |
| Children | One son |
Barry Michael Popkin is an American food science researcher and the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition (as well as Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, where he is the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity. He developed the concept of "nutrition transition". He is the author of over 490 journal articles and a book, "The World is Fat".
Popkin was born in 1944 and grew up in Superior, Wisconsin; neither of his parents had a college education. Popkin describes the food he ate in Superior as "...typical of the way most Americans handled food in the first half of the 20th century." He attended the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1967. He spent the 1965-66 year in India living partly in a squatter area and partly at Delhi University. After which he spent one year doing graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1968, he returned to the University of Wisconsin, and received his MS from there one year later. After a period of civil rights work, he worked at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty for a year and then in 1972 moved to Boston to work. Then he began to work at Cornell University in the fall of 1972 and began his thesis work in Jan 1973. In July 1974, he received his PhD in agricultural economics from Cornell University.
From 1971 to 1972 Popkin worked as a research economist at the Institute for Research in Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. From 1974 to 1976 Popkin was a visiting associate professor with the Rockefeller Foundation in Manila, Philippines. He joined UNC-Chapel Hill's faculty in 1977 and became the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition there in 2011.
Popkin did extensive research from 1971 to the early 1980s on both hunger in America and around the world. He developed with Bob Evenson the Laguna Household Surveys and created the Bicol Multipurpose Survey while living in the Philippines and focused much of his attention there on women, work and the relationship of these activities to maternal and child health. He subsequently returned to the US and worked for a decade on maternal and child nutrition research, including initiating the Cebu Longitudinal Household Health and Nutrition Survey with two economics colleagues. He started the China Health and Nutrition Survey in the mid and late 1980s and it was out of this experience that he wrote a series of papers which created the concept of the nutrition transition. Much of his subsequent research globally has been on the transitions in the way we eat, drink and move and how the most recent stage of this transition has created in regions and countries throughout the globe many shifted toward increased obesity and related noncommunicable diseases and many adverse economic consequences. For many years he was writing and talking about this transition and it took a Bellagio conference he held in 2001 to convince leading scholars globally that low and middle income countries were going through this rapid shift toward a pattern of diet and activity linked with rapid shifts toward obesity.
...
Wikipedia