Karen Glanz

Glanz was born on October 20, 1953[1] in the Cleveland suburbs.[2] Growing up during a time when girls were discouraged from participating in sports, she began to recreationally swim until graduate school.[3] She enrolled at the University of Michigan for her undergraduate degree in Spanish and Master's degree and PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education.[4]

Upon earning her PhD, Glanz became a professor in the Departments of Health Education and Medicine at Temple University and a member of the Division of Population Sciences at the Fox Chase Cancer Center.[5] While at Temple University, she began to research blood pressure and hypertension control programs for regional businesses and industrial sites.[6] She also began to run marathons with her first one being the Philadelphia Distance Run.[2] During her first few years at Temple, Glanz taught health behavior theory without a foundational textbook until she was approached by Barbara Rimer to co-publish one in 1990.[7] As a result of her research, Glanz received the 1984 Early Career Award from the American Public Health Association and 1992 Mayhew Derryberry Award for outstanding contributions to theory and research in health education.[5]

Glanz left Temple University in 1993 to become a professor and director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Program at the Cancer Research Center of Hawai'i at the University of Hawaii.[8] At the turn of the century, Glanz founded and directed REAL, the Hawaiʻi Youth Movement Against the Tobacco Industry,[9] before she left in 2004 to join the Rollins School of Public Health.[5] Upon joining the faculty at Emory University, she founded the Emory Prevention Research Center (EPRC) with Michelle Kegler[10] and was appointed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Task Force on Community Preventive Services.[11] As director of the EPRC, Glanz was appointed to sit on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF) from 2006 until 2016.[12] In 2007, she began a collaboration with the Southwest Georgia Cancer Coalition and New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church to educate the Georgian public about healthy eating.[13] That same year, she was awarded the 2007 Elizabeth Fries Health Education Award for "developing creative and effective interventions to reduce risk behaviors, encourage early detection of cancer, and prevent other acute and chronic diseases".[14]

Glanz stayed at Emory University until 2009 when she became the ninth Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor between the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.[15] The following year, she was appointed the inaugural George A. Weiss University Professor in the School of Medicine and School of Nursing.[16] As a result of her academic research, Glanz was elected a Member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 2013.[17] In her role as George A. Weiss University Professor, Glanz was named the co-director of the University of Pennsylvania's new Prevention Research Center (PRC) alongside Kevin Volpp.[18] She was later recognized by the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters as one of the world's most influential scientific minds[19] and appointed to a four-year term on the Advisory Council for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.[20] In 2018, Glanz was named the associate director for Community Engaged Research and leader for the Cancer Control Program.[21]

• Karen Glanz publications indexed by Google Scholar