Renee Umstattd Meyer

Dr. Umstattd Meyer’s work focuses on promoting health and health equity through an active living lens. She collaborates with communities using mixed methods to understand cultural context and advance approaches and policies to foster healthy and active opportunities and lifestyles for all people. She focuses much of her work partnering with underserved rural communities and families, which has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through Active Living Research and the Physical Activity Research Center (PARC), the Physical Activity Policy Research Network Plus (PAPRN+) through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Education, the American Heart Association through Voices for Healthy Kids, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She co-leads the Physical Activity Research Center (PARC) and the Physical Activity Policy Research and Evaluation Network (PAPREN) Rural Active Living Workgroup, and has been invited to serve on advisory panels and/or lead webinars for American Heart Association, Voices for Healthy Kids, America Walks, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the Physical Activity Alliance, and the Diversity Committee for the 2016 National Physical Activity Plan, to name a few. In addition to serving in these capacities, she co-chaired the 2019 Active Living Conference and is a Fellow and Past-President of the American Academy of Health Behavior, a multidisciplinary society of health behavior scholars and researchers.