CHN Faculty Profiles: Keith P. West, Jr., DrPH

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CHN Faculty Profiles:
Youfa Wang, PhD, MD, MS

While in medical school at the Beijing Medical University, Youfa Wang’s brother and sister-in-law, both practicing physicians, urged him to pursue a career in public health (or preventive medicine, as it is called in China) because they said this was the way to make a difference to a large group of people. Fortunately, he took their advice.

“Youfa brings a multidisciplinary interest in the problem of obesity, a rigorous approach to research of diet-disease relationships, and proven analytical skills for longitudinal data. We could not have found a more perfect fit for our nutrition program.”
--Benjamin Caballero, PhD, MD, CHN Director
From China to Canada (University of Alberta) to Carolina (the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Dr. Wang’s career followed a steep trajectory towards success that inevitably led him to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As of January 2005, Youfa Wang, PhD, MD, MS, joined the Center for Human Nutrition faculty as an Assistant Professor. “One of my goals was to work with Ben Caballero and colleagues here. I am very pleased and honored to be here,” Wang says enthusiastically.

Most recently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), Wang is pleased to join a research-oriented institution like Johns Hopkins where he will be able to find strong collaborators for projects exploring childhood obesity prevention and the influence of environmental, lifestyle, and economic factors on obesity and chronic disease risk. In addition to accumulating 30 publications in the four years he was at UIC, Wang secured an NIH RO1 grant for a three-year obesity prevention program in four low-income, predominantly African-American Chicago public schools. The HEALTH-KIDS (Healthy Eating and Active Lifestyles from school To Home for KIDS) program builds upon some of the components of intervention programs like Pathways (Caballero, PI), and adds other unique components to encourage parental involvement. By influencing kids’ eating habits and physical activity levels, as well as the school and community environments, the program seeks to reduce obesity in these fifth through seventh grade children, 42 percent of whom were overweight or obese at baseline. Recently, Wang and his colleagues also received a 4-year USDA grant to study the influence of economic and social factors on people's lifestyles and obesity.

Wang has collaborated with the Harvard School of Public Health to study the influence of abdominal fat on cardiovascular and diabetes risk using longitudinal data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professional Follow-Up Study (see news release, Waist Size Linked to Diabetes Risk). With colleagues on the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), he has studied the global trends in childhood obesity. Invited as a World Health Organization (WHO) expert working group member, he is helping to develop a new international growth reference for children and adolescents. Wang's previous research suggests that the current international obesity references may need to be adjusted by population, since children in developed countries like the US tend to mature earlier than those in countries like China or Russia. Without adjusting the WHO BMI (body mass index) reference for maturation differences, researchers may underestimate overweight prevalence in countries where children mature more slowly and slightly overestimate overweight in countries, like the US, where kids mature sooner.

The HEALTH-KIDS and other projects of Dr. Wang’s that address health disparities will complement research being conducted by other Center faculty, including Appel, Caballero, Gittelsohn, and Treuth. “Youfa brings a multidisciplinary interest in the problem of obesity both domestically and internationally, a rigorous approach to research of diet-disease relationships, and proven analytical skills for longitudinal data, particularly in the area of growth and anthropometry,” explains CHN director, Benjamin Caballero, PhD, MD. “We could not have found a more perfect fit for our nutrition program.”

Go to Dr. Wang's webpage.
Visit Waist Size Linked to Diabetes Risk news release.