Kim Gans grew up near Philadelphia in Havertown, Pennsylvania. She went to Duke University as a first-generation college student and earned a BS in Biology. She took all the pre-med courses, but switched her interests after taking a course on food and hunger. She completed a Master’s degree in Public Health, with an emphasis in Nutrition at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For her field experience, she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with their cardiovascular disease prevention program. During that time, she learned about the Pawtucket Heart Health Program in Rhode Island, one of three NIH-funded community-based heart disease prevention projects in the US, and moved to RI to work for this program in 1986. As part of that job, she developed, implemented, and evaluated heart disease prevention interventions in worksites, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, churches, and with health care providers. While working, she went back to school at the University of Rhode Island to get her Ph.D. in Nutrition. Upon graduation, she became an Assistant Professor (Research) in Community Health at Brown University, which later became the Brown School of Public Health. Kim was on the Brown faculty from 1992-2014 and also served as Deputy Director and later Director of the Brown Institute for Community Health Promotion. In 2014, she joined the UConn HDFS faculty.
Kim is a nutritionist and behavioral health researcher with almost 40 years of experience in intervention development and evaluation research in community-based settings to improve eating habits, prevent/control obesity, and/or increase physical activity. Her work spans the lifespan from young children to older adults with a focus on low-income and ethnic minority populations. She has been PI or Co-PI of 29 externally funded grants (including 9 NIH R01s and 2 R18s) and Co-I on 28 externally funded grants. Her funding has come from NHLBI, NCI, NICHD, NINR, NIMHD, NIDDK, CDC, USDA, Administration on Aging, multiple foundations, and state agencies. She has published 138 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters. She has also developed numerous educational materials, programs, and dietary assessment tools for the public and providers, including Rate Your Plate and REAP (Rapid Eating and Activity Assessment for Providers), which are widely used nationally.
Much of Kim’s research includes multi-level, community-engaged approaches to improve diet and/or physical activity through changing home, work, school, childcare, and neighborhood nutrition and physical activity environments in conjunction with behavioral interventions. Her research has also focused on applications of innovative health technology, particularly computerized tailoring using print, video, web and/or texting. She also engages in translational research to study dissemination/implementation of effective interventions to various community and clinical settings. Kim is an avid collaborator who enjoys creating multidisciplinary research teams, and a passionate mentor – serving as primary mentor for junior faculty on 6 K grants, 6 diversity supplements, and co-mentor on many more. She has won awards for her mentoring as well as her research.
Kim’s current federal grants support intervention research to improve Southeast Asian children’s diets, to work with family child care providers and/or families to improve the dietary behaviors of preschool children, to understand the impact of enhancements to Meals on Wheels home-delivered meal services on older adults’ health and well-being, and to test the feasibility of incorporating digital obesity prevention modules into the Parents as Teachers home visitation program for families with infants.
Kim currently serves in several leadership roles at InCHIP and has held leadership positions with the American Public Health Association, American Heart Association, International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, Association of Schools of Public Health and Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. Locally, she has served on committees for the RI Multiple Sclerosis Society, RI Food Policy Council, and RI Hunger Elimination Task Force. She also served as Director of Community Engagement for the Brown School of Public Health from 2020-2022.
Outside of work, Kim enjoys traveling, reading books (she has been in the same book club since 1986), genealogy research, wine-tasting, daily New York Times word puzzles and crosswords, going to the beach, weight training, boxing, and walking her standard poodle Basil.