Katherine Frohlich

Katherine Frohlich is a full Professor at the University of Montreal's School of Public Health within the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, where she directs the ISIS research team and holds the McConnell-University of Montreal Knowledge Mobilization Chair in Youth. Her extensive research portfolio spans health promotion, social determinants of health, and social inequalities in health with particular focus on youth transitions, urban environments, and tobacco control.

Her research interests center on critical analyses of health promotion discourses, spatial dimensions of health inequalities, and knowledge mobilization strategies. She examines how public health policies like tobacco control and active play initiatives create unintended consequences for marginalized populations, using innovative methodologies including activity space mapping and critical discourse analysis. Her work consistently challenges deficit-based approaches to health inequities while developing structural intervention frameworks.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals strong thematic continuity in examining how urban environments, social policies, and institutional practices shape health inequalities across the life course. Her research increasingly integrates youth-led knowledge mobilization and structural interventions targeting power imbalances in health determinants, with growing emphasis on pandemic impacts and climate-resilient urban design.

• Health and Place Paper of the Year (2015)
• Humboldt Research Fellowship ($48,000, 2009-2010)
• CIHR New Investigator Award ($300,000, 2008-2013)

Professor Frohlich has supervised over a dozen graduate students through doctoral and master's theses examining smoking inequalities, youth transitions, and health promotion discourses. She currently leads multiple major grants including the Canada Excellence Research Chair in One Urban Health ($25M) and the Levelling the Playing Fields initiative focused on children's outdoor free play. Her research team collaborates extensively across disciplinary boundaries with urban planners, sociologists, and community organizations.

She directs the MYRIAGONE Knowledge Mobilization Chair and leads the ISIS (Interdisciplinary Study of Inequalities in Smoking) research team, which has produced influential work on tobacco control policies and social inequalities. Her current projects emphasize community-led interventions in urban spaces, particularly through School Streets initiatives and recreational street programming that prioritize equity in children's access to public space.