Health Scientist Administrator
Email: deborah.young-hyman@nih.gov
Phone: 301-451-0724
Brief Biography
Dr. Deborah Young-Hyman is a health scientist administrator in the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), Office of the Director, NIH. She currently leads and collaborates on multiple interagency-agency efforts in the treatment and prevention of obesity across the lifespan, including being an NIH co-chair of the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research. Her training reflects her research interests: Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Adelphi University; postdoctoral training in psychoendocrinology, Children’s Hospital, State University of New York at Buffalo, Division of Psychoendocrinology, Department of Pediatric Endocrinology. She also obtained the Certified Diabetes Educator credential and served as the lead author of the “Psychosocial Guidelines for the Treatment of People with Diabetes,” a position statement of the American Diabetes Association (2016). She is a Fellow of The Obesity Society and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. She is currently engaged in initiatives regarding the design of behavioral clinical trial methods, including harmonization of evaluation strategies, with the goal of creating more rigorous and broadly applicable methodologies across the bio-behavioral spectrum. Before joining OBSSR, Dr. Young-Hyman was a professor of pediatrics and allied health at the Medical College of Georgia, studying disordered eating behavior in adolescents with diabetes and pathways to obesity prevention in mother-infant dyads, and she was a faculty member at the University of Maryland Medical School Departments of Pediatric and Adult Endocrinology, where she was an investigator on the NIH-funded Diabetes Control and Complications Trial study. Dr. Young-Hyman also served as a scientific review officer at the Center for Scientific Review and as an intramural scientist at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the laboratory of Dr. Jack Yanovski, studying behavioral and pharmacologic aspects of obesity treatment in adolescents. Of current interest are self-regulation mechanisms associated with eating behavior across the weight span, to identify and test novel strategies for obesity prevention and treatment.
