Overview

Dr. Barkin is an international expert in the field of behavioral interventions and community engaged pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) research. She completed the longest pediatric obesity prevention pragmatic randomized controlled trial for underserved preschool age children. In 2008, she founded the Nashville Collaborative, an academic-community partnership to develop and test two-generation obesity prevention and treatment strategies. Her research addresses health disparities in the prevention of obesity with a family-based approach. She examines the interaction of genetics, behavior, and environment at sensitive periods of childhood development. Over the past 20 years, her studies have demonstrated that behavior change appears to be non-linear and works differently for different sub-groups. She developed one of the only community behavioral interventions for Latinx preschool-age overweight/obese children that effectively reduced BMI, a program now implemented in recreation centers nationally. Her success was due to the novel integration of the science of social networks as an integral part of her behavior change interventions. Her findings challenge conventional wisdom regarding obesity prevention in underserved populations, paving the way for new directions to address this thorny issue that disproportionately affects under-represented minority populations. Additionally, trained as a health services researcher, she is pragmatic at building processes and testing new approaches to improve health outcomes with a focus on health equity.

She has authored more than 130 manuscripts and has been consistently grant-funded for more than 25 years. She served as the President for the Society for Pediatric Research(2016-2017) and on the Board of Children, Youth, and Families for the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering (2009-2016). Additionally, she chaired the NAM Consensus Committee on Obesity Prevalence and Trends (2015-2016). She represented the National Research Council for the International Scientific Symposium in Scotland on epigenetics and obesity (2013) and developed and led the NAM Workshop, "Examining a Developmental Approach to Childhood Obesity: The Fetal and Early Childhood Years" (2015). In 2018, she was selected as the Pediatrician of the year for the state of Tennessee and in 2019, she received the Academic Pediatric Associations national researcher award. She was nominated by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve a four-year term on an NIH Advisory Council (2020-2024). In 2021 she received the Levi Watkins Jr Award for commitment to diversity and was elected into the National Academy of Medicine. In 2022, she became the Chair of Pediatrics and the Physician-in-Chief for the Childrens Hosptial of Richmond at VCU. In 2024, she became the Pediatrician in Chief of Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine.

Academic Appointment

• Acting Professor, Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine

Education

Research