Lisa Gittner, Ph.D.

Personal Information

LisaAnn S. Gittner, PhD is an assistant professor of Public Policy at Texas Tech University, Department of Political Science and of Public Health at Texas Tech University Health Science Center. She is also an associate in the Laura Bush Institute for Women’s Health and a member of the Obesity Research Cluster. She has studied early life obesity since 2006. She has modeled obesity etiology and growth trajectories in early life and are currently expanding the work to the elimination of childhood obesity in minority communities. She also developed the content for, built, and tested the implementation of a serious game to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities in patients with diabetes, hypertension and COPD in medically and socially disenfranchised communities.

She is expanding the serious game to teach parents about appropriate care for their children to prevent obesity development especially in low resource communities. Currently, she is funded on a NIH Center grant for the elimination of health disparities (5P20MD000516), where we developed the public health exposome dataset and new combinatorial analysis methods that compares > 10,000 independent factors’ relationship to the dependent variable. Our technique is based on graph analysis algorithms that group factors together into cliques by the tightness of their association. We (are currently funded to model factors connected to infant mortality to eliminate health disparities and modeling the multifactorial components of obesity. In summary, her current research focuses on poor health outcomes that derive from unhealthy communities, especially medically (rural and minority) and socially (LGBT and immigrant) disenfranchised communities.

Through her research on the management of life course / lifestyle diseases (e.g. obesity). She devises community based interventions that are both sustainable and reasonable. Dr. Gittner received her BSc from Wright State University in biological sciences and chemistry, MSc from Wright State University in toxicology and her PhD from The University of Akron in public administration and applied health policy.

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