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gail Woodward-Lopez, M.P.H., R.D., is associate director of the Atkins 
Center for Weight & Health at the University of California, Berkeley. She 
has more than 20 years of experience developing, implementing, and evalu-
ating public health programs. The focus of her current work is the evalua-
tion of school- and community-based programs to prevent childhood obe-
sity. She has served on the evaluation team for two multisector, place-based 
obesity prevention initiatives and has led various statewide and multi-state 
projects to evaluate school wellness policy implementation and school 
nutrition legislation. Currently, she heads the strategy-level evaluation of 
Kaiser Permanente’s Healthy Eating Activity Living initiative in Northern 
California and focuses on school and community environmental measures 
for the national, Healthy Communities Study funded by NIH. She is bilin-
gual, has worked extensively with the Latino community in California and 
Latin America, and has served as a consultant for several international 
agencies. In addition to publications of her research findings, she published 
a book on the determinants of obesity and several comprehensive literature 
reviews on the effectiveness of nutrition and physical activity interventions 
to improve academic performance, behavior, and health outcomes. She 
received an M.P.H. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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