Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will address “Reversing Childhood Obesity: Helping All Children Lead Healthier Lives” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, in Light Hall, Room 208. The event, part of the Discovery Lecture Series, is sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs.
Approximately 23 million children and adolescents in the United States – nearly one in three young people – are either obese or overweight, putting them at higher risk for serious or life-threatening health problems. If the childhood obesity epidemic is not reversed, the current generation of young people could be the first in U.S. history to live sicker and die younger than their parents.
The epidemic is particularly severe in communities of color. African American, Latino, American Indian and Asian/Pacific Islander children, and children living in lower-income areas, are at the greatest risk, exacerbating health inequities and pervasive health disparities.
Lavizzo-Mourey will discuss the causes of the obesity epidemic and describe strategies being developed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to reverse the epidemic by 2015. Under her leadership, the foundation has restructured its strategic investments to target a set of high-impact priorities, among them:
- Improving the quality and safety of patient care
- Strengthening state and local public health systems
- Halting the rise in childhood obesity by 2015
- Covering the uninsured.
Lavizzo-Mourey joined RWJF in 2001 as senior vice president and director of its health care group. Prior to that, she was the Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the university’s Institute on Aging. She also has served as deputy administrator of what is now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality in Washington, D.C.
Lavizzo-Mourey earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was trained in geriatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Contact: Jenny Yufei Cao
yufei.cao@vanderbilt.edu