Deborah Tate

Deborah Tate is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Health Behavior and serves as Director of the Communication for Health Applications and Interventions (CHAI) Core, a shared resource for the Nutrition Obesity Research Center and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Tate is a behavioral scientist with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Virginia Tech, known for pioneering research in digital health interventions for obesity prevention.

• Education: PhD in Clinical Psychology (Virginia Tech, 1999)
• Appointments: Department of Nutrition (Primary), Department of Health Behavior (Joint), Nutrition Research Institute (Faculty Appointment)

Her research focuses on two major areas:

• Optimizing digital and wearable technology-based interventions for weight regulation and disease prevention
• Advancing precision public health through adaptive trial designs and individualized intervention strategies
• Developing scalable behavioral treatments using Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) and Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) frameworks

Dr. Tate's work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2000, with publications in top journals including:

• JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)
• New England Journal of Medicine
• Obesity
• American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
• Health Psychology

She teaches the graduate-level course mHealth for Behavior Change and serves in leadership roles including:

• Director of UNC Weight Research Program
• Director of CHAI Core
• Member of Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
• Internal Advisory Board Member, Nutrition Obesity Research Center