Penny Gordon-Larsen

Dr. Gordon-Larsen serves as the interim vice chancellor for research. Under her direction, the office is responsible for setting strategic priorities for research, managing proposals and awards, providing research infrastructure, identifying and managing funding opportunities, and developing collaborative research teams and partnerships. Prior to this appointment, she served as the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s associate dean for research.

Dr. Gordon-Larsen is trained as a human biologist whose research focuses on issues related to ethnicity, disparities, and development of obesity over the lifecycle, with attention to pathways linking environment and behavior to cardiometabolic risk. Her portfolio ranges from molecular and genetic to environmental and societal-level factors that influence health, and she has collaborations across the university. She is a distinguished professor of global nutrition in the nutrition department, which is jointly housed in the Gillings School and the School of Medicine and she is a fellow of the Carolina Population Center.

She served as President of The Obesity Society in 2015. She received the Eli Lilly Scientific Achievement Award in 2010 and the George A. Bray Founders Award in 2020, both from The Obesity Society. She also served on the NIH Nutrition Research Thought Leaders Panel and as Chair for the NIH Kidney, Nutrition, Obesity and Diabetes Study Section. And she currently serves on the NIHʼs National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases advisory council and co-chairs the NIDDKʼs Strategic Plan Dissemination and Implementation Research Subgroup.

Dr. Gordon-Larsen holds a BA degree in Anthropology and Psychology from Tulane University. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Biology from University of Pennsylvania and post-doctoral training in Nutritional Epidemiology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.