Karen Glanz, PhD, MPH is George A. Weiss University Professor, Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Nursing. She is the Program Co-Leader for the Cancer Control Program at the Abramson Cancer Center at UPenn, where she also served as Associate Director for Community Engaged Research from 2018-2022.

Her research in community and healthcare settings focuses on obesity, nutrition, and the built environment; reducing health disparities; and health communication technologies. She has published over 540 articles and chapters, and is lead Editor on five editions of the widely used text, Health Behavior: Theory, Research and Practice (Jossey-Bass/Wiley: 1990, 1996, 2002, 2008, 2015). Her research and publications about understanding, measuring and improving healthy food environments, beginning in the 1980’s, have been widely recognized and replicated.

She served on the NHLBI Advisory Council from 2017-2021 and on the US Task Force on Community Preventive Services from 2006-2016. Dr. Glanz was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (previously known as the Institute of Medicine) in 2013. She has an H-index of 112 and was designated a Highly Cited Author by ISIHighlyCited.com, in the top 1% of authors in her field over a 20-year period, from 2006 to the present. She was designated as one of The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2015 by Thomson Reuters. In 2022 she was recognized as a Top Female Scientist, and in 2023 a Top Scientist by Research.com.