Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH is the Irving Schulman, MD Endowed Professor in Child Health, Professor of Pediatrics and of Medicine, in the Division of General Pediatrics and the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. Dr. Robinson focuses on "solution-oriented" research, developing and evaluating health promotion and disease prevention interventions for children, adolescents and their families to directly inform medical and public health practice and policy.
His research is largely experimental in design, conducting school-, family- and community-based randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy and/or effectiveness of theory-driven behavioral, social and environmental interventions to prevent and reduce obesity, improve nutrition, increase physical activity and decrease inactivity, reduce smoking, reduce children's television and media use, and demonstrate causal relationships between hypothesized risk factors and health outcomes. Robinson's research is grounded in social cognitive models of human behavior, uses rigorous methods, and is performed in generalizable settings with diverse populations, making the results of his research more relevant for clinical and public health practice and policy.