Dr. Field was a panelist for the Forum’s discussion on Eating Disorders, Mental Health, and Body Image.
Alison Field’s research focuses on determining the optimal classification for eating and weight-related disorders and identifying the modifiable causes, correlates, consequences, and course of overweight and eating disorders among children, adolescents, and adult women. Her early research on eating disorders focused on identifying the personal, peer, family, and media influences on starting to binge eat, purge, or develop an eating disorder. She is currently investigating how eating disorders should be best classified, and is pursuing obesity classification research using a variety of samples of children, adolescents, and adults. Field earned her ScD in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she was also a professor of both epidemiology and pediatrics before coming to Brown.
