Lisa Kakinami

Lisa Kakinami is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, affiliated with the Department of Health, Kinesiology & Applied Physiology, the Montreal Health Statistics Centre, and the PERFORM Centre. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. Her research focuses on obesity and cardiovascular disease risk from epidemiological and applied biostatistical perspectives, emphasizing weight history, eating behaviors, social and built environments, and socioeconomic determinants of health.

Publications across 2025-2023 reveal trends in biostatistical methodologies for obesity/health analysis, environmental epidemiology (neighborhood safety, built environment), mental health in youth, and technology validation for dietary tracking. Key subfields include compensatory behavior modeling, cardiometabolic risk stratification, chronobiology of exercise, and social network analysis.

• Social Science and Medicine (2018): Income and leisure-time physical activity
• Biostatistics (2021): Adiposity phenotyping vs. BMI
• Environmental Health (2018): Neighborhood built environment and obesity

She has been recognized as a Fellow of Science College for her research contributions. Her supervised students frequently appear as co-authors in Frontiers in Psychology, Appetite, and Preventive Medicine publications. Current projects examine weight history’s health consequences and neighborhood socioeconomic influences on cardiometabolic outcomes.