Albert J. Stunkard

Albert Stunkard, M.D. is a professor of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania where he served for 11 years as the Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and founded the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders. Dr. Stunkard received a B.S. from Yale University in 1943 and an M.D. from Columbia University in 1945. He has investigated both genetic and environmental influences on human obesity, using adoptees, twins, differing social classes, and the Old Order Amish. For the past 18 years, he has been conducting a large-scale prospective longitudinal study of the growth and development of children at high risk of obesity. He also studies deviant eating patterns, having been the first to describe binge eating and having developed treatment for binge eating disorder. He is currently investigating another eating disorder -- the night eating syndrome. He is the author of nearly 500 publications, mostly in the field of obesity and eating disorders and his research has been supported for 50 years by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Stunkard has served as Past President of the American Association of Chairmen of Departments of Psychiatry, the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases, the American Psychosomatic Society, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and he serves on the editorial boards of seven journals in the fields of nutrition and behavioral medicine.