Dr. David Schlundt
Associate Professor of Psychology
Adjunct Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Meharry Medical College
Vanderbilt Comprehensive Cancer Center
Research Specialty and Description:
Dr. Schlundt has a range of interests in the field of behavioral medicine having worked with diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and eating disorders. His work has focused on measurement and assessment issues, articularly the measurement of eating behavior. He has authored and published number of measurement instruments including the Dieter’s Inventory of Eating Temptations (DIET), Situational Obstacles to Dietary Adherence (SODA), Body Image Testing System (BITS), the Eating Styles Questionnaire (ESQ), the Personal Diabetes Questionnaire (PDQ), and the Eating Behavior Patterns Questionnaire (EBPQ). Recently, Dr. Schlundt has developed a food frequency questionnaire for use in the National Cancer Institute funded Southern Community Cohort Study (www.southerncommunitystudy.org).
In recent years, Dr. Schlundt has directed his attention to the issue of racial and ethnic health disparities. He was instrumental in helping the Nashville Disparities Coalition obtain funding for REACH 2010 (www.cdc.gov/reach2010) and is currently funded to help evaluate this project. For the Nashville REACH 2010 project, Dr. Schlundt has developed and implemented an innovative web-based system for the collection and analysis of process and outcome data. He has also contributed to the development and evaluation of community-based interventions to modify eating and exercise behaviors that are part of the Nashville REACH 2010 effort ( healthbehavior.psy.vanderbilt.edu/reach/index.htm). Dr. Schlundt worked to obtain funding from the NIDDK for a Behavioral Health Disparities Core at Meharry Medical College. This core supports externally funded research intended to better understand or reduce health disparities in diabetes and obesity.