Faculty: Jonathan Ellen of the School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics and Andrew Cherlin, of the JHU Department of Sociology Description: Jonathan Ellen and Andrew Cherlin formed a working group on the interaction of biology and environment in race/ethnic disparities in childhood obesity. They first convened a series of consultative meetings with leading researchers have reviewed biology, environmental factors, biology/environment interaction study design, and family/individual factors. From these meetings, an interdisciplinary team of Hopkins researchers is writing an application to NIH focused on racial/ethnic disparities in childhood obesity. The authors propose to study the topic at several levels simultaneously by nesting a study of children and their families with particular neighborhoods that vary in their built environment. The investigators plan to randomly-selected households in these neighborhoods that have two or more children. They then plan to use the naturally-occurring variation in genetic relationships among children in low-income households (e.g., full-siblings, half-siblings, stepsiblings) to examine the contribution of heredity to childhood obesity while also controlling for family-environmental and built-environmental influences. Return to Research Development Core Last Updated: December 2007 | 
