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Lynda Powell
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Lynda Powell

Medicine
Rush Medical College

Fellowship year

2015-16 - Rush Medical College - Study 53
 

At CASBS, Lynda Powell aims to tackle one of the most significant challenges in health care today, by writing a book on innovations in sustained lifestyle change that draw upon the multidisciplinary expertise provided by the rich CASBS environment. Healthy living is fundamental to chronic disease prevention and management. Decades of research have shown that we can produce lifestyle changes, but we cannot make them stick. The status quo is to target individual behaviors and keep a blind eye to the social, cultural, environmental, economic, and policy-level factors that drive them. A potential solution to the sustainability problem is to take a multidisciplinary perspective.

Powell is professor in the department of family and preventative medicine at Rush University Medical Center.  She is recognized for expertise in developing behavioral interventions to improve chronic diseases, and rigorous methods for evaluating them in clinical trials. She has trained over 800 new investigators as a founding faculty member in two NIH training institutes. During her 2015-16 CASBS fellowship, she wrote the first book on methods for behavioral clinical trials for chronic diseases.  Powell has shown that after a six-month lifestyle intervention, health benefits were sustained by two years. Core elements of the intervention integrated strategies from psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics, suggesting the potential value of a multidisciplinary approach to solving the sustainability problem.