Inter-Disciplinary Obesity Center
The escalating prevalence of obesity and its consequences is a serious and unresolved challenge. Obesity prevention and treatment have had limited success to date, in part because interventions have focused on isolated factors and adopted a "one size fits all" approach.
We hypothesize that obesity must be addressed within a complex, individualized system of proximate and distal biological and environmental factors using an intensive interdisciplinary approach. To be effective, such an approach requires coalescing scientists and practitioners who specialize in obesity from a broad range of perspectives and providing them with a fertile environment and infrastructure to synergize their expertise with that of investigators from other key disciplines.
The long-term goal of this interdisciplinary strategy is to define effective interventions for prevention and treatment of obesity. Our vision for this NIH Roadmap planning grant (P20RR20649) is to build on the collaborative environment at UNC that includes departments across the Schools of Public Health and Medicine, Allied Health Sciences, and Arts and Sciences, and NIH-funded centers that are addressing the obesity epidemic, including the Clinical Nutrition Research Center, Carolina Population Center, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences, and the Lineberger Cancer Center.
