Jennifer Orlet Fisher, Ph.D.

Dr. Jennifer Orlet Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health at Temple University and a research scientist at the Temple University Center for Obesity Research and Education where she directs the Family Eating Laboratory. She holds graduate degrees in Nutrition from the University of Illinois (A.M., Nutritional Sciences, 1993) and from the Pennsylvania State University (Ph.D., Nutrition, 1997). Prior to her appointment at Temple University, Dr. Fisher was an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and scientist at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Houston TX.

Dr. Fisher research focuses on the development of eating behavior during infancy and early childhood. The broad goal of her research is to understand how early eating environments influence child behavioral controls of food intake and health outcomes, particularly overweight. Her efforts focus on the role of the family environment, as a first and fundamental context in which eating habits develop. A series of studies from her laboratory demonstrate the intake promoting effects of serving large portions to young children. She has also observed that children’s eating in the absence of hunger is associated with the use of restrictive feeding practices. Alternatively, recent findings indicate that problems of intake regulation have a sizeable genetic component. She is currently conducting research to understand how infant feeding interactions influence the regulation of food intake and overweight during the first years of life. Another series of studies investigates how preschool aged children come to understand “how much is enough” in selecting food portions.

Dr. Fisher has more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications. Her work has received national media coverage by the New York Times, the Scientific American Frontiers series on PBS, and more recently, the Discovery Health Channel. Dr. Fisher was the 2006 recipient of the Alex Malspina Future Leader Award given by the International Life Sciences Institute North America.