Tackling and Researching Prevention in Pediatric Primary Care

Eliana M. Perrin, MD, MPH is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Primary Care with appointments in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship Program-trained clinician investigator whose areas of research expertise are patient-oriented preventive care, health services research, health disparities, health equity, and the prevention and treatment of pediatric obesity and other chronic health problems. She has developed, disseminated, and studied many tools to help pediatricians in practice prevent and treat obesity including the color-coded BMI charts that many use in outpatient practice. She has been the lead on numerous grants (including a multi-site randomized controlled trial NIH R01 and its renewal) on obesity and children’s health. This study (Greenlight) followed 865 mother-child dyads (50% Latino, 27% African American) from age two months to five years at four sites and looked at early feeding, physical activity, screen time, injury prevention, literacy, and obesity prevention. She is now a Co-Principal Investigator on a 6-site PCORI funded large comparative effectiveness randomized controlled trial of obesity prevention that has enrolled 900 infants and their parents and has an m-health component. She has served on numerous national committees and initiatives trying to prevent obesity including a roundtable of the AAP and RWJ looking at ways to prevent childhood obesity 0-5. She has been a central part of two grants from the NIH exploring the connections between culture and health including as PI of a multi-disciplinary, team science grant (R24) which looked at children’s movies and obesogenic messages and stigma. She was previously faculty at UNC (where she won the Hettleman award, the highest award for university scholarship) and Duke. She has held previous roles as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Division Chief of Primary Care Pediatrics, founding Director of the Duke Center for Childhood Obesity Research, and a fellowship director of the National Clinicians Scholars Program at Duke University. She is a member of the Society of Pediatric Research and American Pediatrics Society and previously served as the national chair for the Academic Pediatrics Association Research Committee. She recently was awarded the Academic Pediatric Association’s Miller-Sarkin national award for holistic mentoring, and she has served as a mentor to over a dozen career development awardees. She has been a board-certified primary care pediatrician for over 20 years, including at the Harriet Lane Clinic currently.