Dr Sara Benjamin Neelon, Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at CEDAR and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been appointed as the Inaugural Director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Sarah joined Johns Hopkins in July 2015 from Duke University where she worked as an Associate Professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at the Duke University Medical Center and the Duke Global Health Institute. She completed a PhD and MPH at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on policy and environmental approaches to obesity prevention in vulnerable populations.

The Lerner Center focuses on developing and disseminating innovative and effective health promotion and advocacy interventions that address key health issues. Throughout her accomplished career in public health, Dr Benjamin Neelon has exhibited excellence in both scholarly research and real-world application; an interest in expanding the reach and efficacy of public health programming; and the ability and expertise to facilitate change on a broad scale. The NAP SACC intervention that she helped test during her doctoral dissertation has been adopted across the USA as a trusted, widely used tool for improving nutrition and physical activity in the child care setting, and in 2010 was named by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity as one of three innovative early childhood programs to help combat childhood obesity.

At CEDAR, Dr Benjamin Neelon leads research examining policy and environmental approaches to obesity prevention in pregnancy and childhood.

• Dr Benjamin Neelon’s CEDAR page
• Dr Benjamin Neelon’s JHSPH page
• Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion