Susan Carnell, PhD

Assistant Professor, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Susan Carnell received her BA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford and completed her PhD in Health Psychology at University College London (UCL). After completing a post-doc fellowship at UCL, she moved to the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at Columbia University, and in 2013 she became faculty at Johns Hopkins.

Her research program focuses on biobehavioral influences on obesity, including neuroimaging studies of appetite, and studies of genetic and familial influences on children's eating behavior. At the GOPC, she collaborates with other center members to investigate how biobehavioral factors interact with the obesogenic environment to promote or protect against obesity.

Dr. Carnell enjoys communicating the science of eating to the public and has a blog on the Psychology Today magazine website called Bad Appetite.

For more information see here.

Representative Publications:

• Carnell S, Benson L, Driggin E & Kolbe L (2014) Parent feeding behavior and child appetite: Associations depend on feeding style. International Journal of Eating Disorders, Epub Jun 27.
• Carnell S, Benson L, Pantazatos S, Hirsch J & Geliebter A (2014) Amodal midbrain/VTA activation and functional connectivity in response to high energy-density food cues in obesity, Obesity, 22(11): 2370-2378.
• Carnell S, Benson L, Pryor K & Driggin E (2013) Appetitive traits from infancy to adolescence: Using behavioral and neural measures to investigate obesity risk. Physiology & Behavior, Epub Feb 28.
• Carnell S, Haworth CMA, Plomin R & Wardle J (2008) Genetic influence on appetite in children. International Journal of Obesity, 32, 1468-1473.
• Carnell S & Wardle J (2007) Measuring behavioural susceptibility to obesity: validation of the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire. Appetite, 48, 104-113.

For a full publications list see here.