Dr. Alison Field is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, with academic appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she is a part of the Channing Laboratory. Dr. Field’s research focuses on the causes, correlates, consequences, and course of overweight and disordered eating among children, adolescents, and adult women. Dr. Field has published over 40 journal articles and 3 book chapters. At present, her research bases are the approximately 116,000 adult women in the Nurses' Health Study II and 16,800 of their children who comprise the Growing Up Today Study. As part of her career development award from NIH, she assessed the consequences and correlates of weight cycling among women in the Nurses' Health Study II; however, now the majority of her research is focused on children and adolescents. She is a co-founder of the Growing Up Today Study, which was established in 1996 to assess the predictors of dietary intake, activity, and weight gain during a four-year period. Her research within the study is primarily related to the epidemiology of weight gain, weight concerns, weight control practices, and bulimic behaviors. She has published several papers on the role of the media in the development of weight concerns and weight control practices among preadolescent and adolescent girls and boys. She is the principal investigator on the NIH grant to continue following the Growing Up Today Study cohort from 2002 to 2007 to investigate determinants, including media influences, of binge eating, purging (i.e., use of vomiting or laxatives) and eating disorders of at least subsyndromal severity. In addition, Dr. Field is the principal investigator of a NIH grant to assess the relationship between weight control behaviors and weight change among young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

» Back to Staff