Thomas N. Robinson

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.

His research is published widely in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Robinson received both his B.S. and M.D. from Stanford University and his M.P.H. in Maternal and Child Health from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his internship and residency in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital, Boston and Harvard Medical School, and then returned to Stanford for post-doctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Robinson joined the faculty at Stanford in 1993, was appointed Assistant Professor in 1996, and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2003. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar, was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committees on Prevention of Obesity in Children and Adolescents and Progress in Preventing Childhood Obesity, and is Principal Investigator on numerous prevention studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Robinson also is Board Certified in Pediatrics, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and practices General Pediatrics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.