Advance-CTR

Kim M. Gans, PhD, MPH is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Social Health Sciences and Director of Community Engagement at the Brown School of Public Health.  She is also Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and Institute for Collaboration on Health, Interventions, and Policy (InCHIP) at the University of Connecticut. In 2020 she received the InCHIP Faculty Mentoring Award. Previously she was Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Social Health Sciences and Director of the Institute for Community Health Promotion (now the Institute for Health Promotion and Health Equity).

Dr. Gans has over 30 years of experience in intervention development and evaluation research in community-based settings to improve diet, physical activity and/or weight. The majority of her research has been with ethnic minority, low income and/or low literate populations. Much of her research includes multi-level approaches to improve diet and/or physical activity through changing home, work, school, childcare and neighborhood nutrition and physical activity environments in conjunction with behavioral interventions.

Her research has also focused on applications of innovative health technology, particularly computerized tailoring using print, video, web and texting. Another major emphasis of her work is on translational research to study the dissemination of effective interventions to various community and clinical settings. Dr. Gans is also an expert in intervention mapping, a step-wise protocol for developing theory-based and evidence-based health promotion programs. She has been teaching a graduate course on this method for over 19 years and has helped students and faculty members design interventions for multiple health topics. 

Dr. Gans received a BS in Biology from Duke University, an MPH from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a PhD in Nutrition from the University of Rhode Island. She has been a PI on 25 externally funded research grants and Co-PI on 22 externally funded grants and has over 110 publications.