Expert on obesity to speak Feb. 22 as part of York Distinguished Lecturer Series

February 22, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — David Allison, an expert on obesity and director of the Clinical Nutrition Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will be the featured speaker Feb. 22 for the 2006 York Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Florida.

Allison, whose topic will be “Environmental Interactions with Genetics that Influence Obesity,” will speak at 3:30 p.m. at UF’s Reitz Student Union auditorium in Gainesville. Beginning at 2 p.m., there will be a reception for Allison in the union’s Bryan Lounge. Both events are free and open to the public.

He will address some of the complex reasons why people in the United States appear to be growing more obese, a trend that began at least 100 years ago. Evidence will be presented that numerous environmental, social, economic and nutritional factors conspire to interact with genetic predispositions to produce an obesity-prone society. Prevention and interventions will be discussed.

“It is well documented that obesity predisposes one to earlier mortality,” Allison said. “Yet, the exact nature of the relationships among body weight, body composition and caloric intake with respect to longevity remain the subject of much controversy, confusion and ongoing research.”

Allison, who is also a professor of biostatistics and head of the section on statistical genetics, joined the UAB faculty in 2001. Prior to that, he was a research scientist at the New York Obesity Research Center and associate professor of medical psychology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He received his doctoral degree from Hofstra University in 1990, and then he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a second post-doctoral fellowship at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center.

His professional honors include the 2002 Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from the North American Association for the Study of Obesity and the 2002 Andre Mayer Award from the International Association for the Study of Obesity.

Allison also holds several grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He served on the Council of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity from 1995 to 2001, and he has been a member of the Board of Trustees for the International Life Science Institute, North America, since January 2002.

The author of three books and more than 300 scientific publications, Allison serves on the editorial boards of: Obesity Reviews; Nutrition Today; Public Library of Science (PLOS) Genetics; International Journal of Obesity; Behavior Genetics; Computational Statistics and Data Analysis; and Human Heredity.

The York Distinguished Lecturer Series was established in 1984 through an endowment from E.T. York and Vam York. As provost for agriculture and vice president for agriculture and natural resources at UF from 1963 to 1973, E.T. York brought together the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the Florida Cooperative Extension Service and the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station under a single administrative umbrella of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS). For more information, go to http://yorklecture.ifas.ufl.edu.