Amelia Willits-Smith, PhD, is a Cancer Research Training Award fellow (CRTA) in the Behavioral Research Program’s (BRP) Health Behaviors Research Branch (HBRB). In this role, she works with Dr. Kirsten Herrick and others in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) on projects related to methods used to measure and model how lifestyle factors such as nutrition, obesity, physical activity, and sleep influence or predict cancer development and how these methods can be applied in research to help improve public health.
Prior to joining NCI, Dr. Willits-Smith earned her PhD in public health (with a nutrition focus) from Tulane University; her MS in community nutrition from Cornell University; and her BS in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Dr. Willits-Smith’s dissertation and postdoctoral work have been on a project summarizing and linking food-related life cycle assessment studies to U.S. dietary data. The resulting database of Food Impacts on the Environment for Linking to Diet (dataFIELD) has been used to examine the distributions and correlates of food-related greenhouse gas emissions, cumulative energy demand, and water use from self-selected U.S. diets.