North honored for mentorship, leadership in obesity-related disparities research
November 13, 2018
Kari North, PhD, professor of epidemiology at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, was honored Nov. 13 at The Obesity Society’s Obesity Week 2018 conference, held Nov. 11-15 in Nashville, Tenn.
North received the 2018 Shiriki Kumanyika Diversity and Disparities Leadership Award, which aims to recognize researchers who make a significant difference in the area of obesity-related disparities and who has exhibited significant leadership in the mentorship of new investigators.
“I am so pleased to see Kari North recognized for her stellar research on health disparities, her efforts to ameliorate health disparities by halting the underrepresentation of diverse populations in genetic databases, and for her considerable commitment to diversity and inclusion in her service and mentorship,” said Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD, professor of nutrition and associate dean for research at the Gillings School.
North leads the UNC epidemiology department’s Cardiovascular Disease Genetic Epidemiology Computational Laboratory, an interdisciplinary collaborative with expertise in family- and population-based genetic epidemiological research. She also is a faculty member at the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences.
At the national level, she is on the editorial board of several prominent journals and serves in leadership roles in The Obesity Society and the American Heart Association Epidemiology Council.
Contact the Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@listserv.unc.edu.