Lisaann S. Gittner

Lisaann S. Gittner, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Texas Tech University (Department of Political Science) and Public Health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). She is also an associate at the Laura Bush Institute for Women's Health and a member of the Obesity Research Cluster. Her research focuses on early life obesity modeling, community health disparities, and the development of serious games to improve health outcomes in disenfranchised communities.

• Education: BSc in Biological Sciences and Chemistry from Wright State University, MSc in Toxicology, and PhD in Public Administration and Applied Health Policy from The University of Akron.

Dr. Gittner’s work addresses lifestyle diseases and unhealthy community environments, with a focus on rural, minority, and socially marginalized populations (LGBT, immigrant, medically underserved). She employs combinatorial analysis methods and graph algorithms to model >10,000 factors impacting health outcomes like infant mortality and obesity. Her research emphasizes sustainable, community-based interventions.

She currently holds a NIH Center grant (5P20MD000516) to eliminate health disparities and has contributed to public health exposome datasets. Dr. Gittner collaborates with the Laura Bush Institute for Women's Health and TTUHSC’s School of Population and Public Health.