Broadly, I am interested in the various contexts and factors which influence infants' and children's eating behaviors and weight outcomes, including weight status trajectories and risk for overweight. Although my focus is on micro-level factors, such as child temperament and parenting, I am interested in the implications of these relations as they combine with the other contexts in which the child develops, including the child's experiences at school, the overarching cultural norms, policy, and aspects of the built environment.

I am currently investigating relations between temperament and weight outcomes. In other words, does an infant or child's innate predispositions to exhibit certain behavioral tendencies make them more or less susceptible to particular weight-related outcomes, including weight gain and overweight risk? In combining temperament and childhood obesity research, I hope to reinforce the point that obesity is a multi-factorial disease and that additionally, individuals arrive at this common outcome via different paths (equifinality). Such research could eventually be used to inform childhood obesity interventions, both the screening procedures used and the behaviors targeted, and could be applied early in the lifespan.

I am also interested in examining how temperamental dimensions and aspects of the family environment combine to predict weight outcomes. This information could be used to teach parents about constructing environments conducive to a child's temperament (a "goodness of fit" perspective). Similarly, a temperament perspective could inform the interpretation of pre-existing studies of child weight, examining whether previously-studied relations between predictors and obesity outcomes could be moderated by dimensions of temperament (and thus, might only be "true" for a subset of individuals).