Johns Hopkins to establish new global center for childhood obesity

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been awarded a $16 million U54 cooperative agreement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a global center of excellence to address the childhood obesity epidemic. The new Johns Hopkins Global Center for Childhood Obesity will emphasize the integration of geospatial analysis with a systems science and transdisciplinary approach to childhood obesity, bringing together basic science, epidemiology, nutrition, medicine, engineering and environmental and social policy research, among other fields, in an unprecedented, innovative way. Based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and in collaboration with scientists at the NIH, the Center will involve more than 40 investigators from 15 domestic and international institutions, including faculty from five Johns Hopkins schools, namely Whiting School of Engineering, School of Medicine, School of Nursing and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

The $16 million grant, provided by the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), will fund research and training initiatives over the next five years. The Johns Hopkins University and several other institutions are providing an additional $4 million in funding support.

The Global Center for Childhood Obesity is a key new initiative under the auspices of the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), which coordinates childhood obesity research across the NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In addition to studying the drivers of the childhood obesity epidemic and environmental and policy interventions, the Center will also provide rapid-response grants to investigators in the field worldwide to obtain time-sensitive data on environmental and policy changes relevant to childhood obesity.

"The new Center will address many needs in the prevention and study of childhood obesity. This initiative will help create research and training opportunities that go beyond traditional methods, and on an unprecedented global scale," said Youfa Wang, MD, MS, PhD, founding director of the Center and associate professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of International Health.

"The Center's focus on systems science will help train a new generation of researchers and public health professionals to help fight the growing global epidemic of childhood obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases. We are going to bring together a large number of investigators from many different disciplines and from different countries to address the complexity of childhood obesity," said Layla Esposito, PhD, program director from the NICHD. Terry Huang, PhD, MPH, senior scientific advisor to NCCOR, concurs.

The new Center will provide a research and training infrastructure for building the capacity for integrating systems science into obesity and chronic disease research. Study results are expected to inform policy design and future empirical research.

"Childhood obesity is a pressing issue in both the United States and developing countries. The Global Center for Childhood Obesity will seek answers to this challenge, which is in line with the Bloomberg School's fundamental mission of protecting health and saving lives—millions at a time," said Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"The Global Center for Childhood Obesity will draw upon resources from across Johns Hopkins University to focus our diverse scientific and academic resources on addressing the obesity epidemic in new ways," said Lloyd Minor, MD, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of Johns Hopkins University.