Ashley Gearhardt – Sustainable Food Systems Initiative

Ashley Gearhardt

Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology

Department Profile

Ashley Gearhardt, Ph.D., earned her B.A. in psychology from The University of Michigan as an undergraduate. While working on her doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University, Dr. Gearhardt became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process. To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) to operationalize addictive eating behaviors, which has recently been linked with more frequent binge eating episodes in clinical populations, increased prevalence of obesity and patterns of neural activation implicated in other addictive behaviors. Dr. Gearhardt also investigates how advertising for junk food may increase susceptibility to obesity in teens by activating reward regions in the brain.  She has published over 40 academic articles and her research has been featured on media outlets, such as ABC News, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

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