Anna Wilkinson
Associate Professor
512/391-2528
University of Texas Administration Building
1616 Guadalupe, Suite 6.300, Austin, TX 78701
About
Anna Wilkinson, Ph.D. joined the UTHealth School of Public Health in Austin and the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living in July 2010; she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. She earned her Ph.D. in Community Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin in 1996, completed a post-doc in social epidemiology at the Kansas Health Institute from 1997-98, in 2000 joined the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and in 2003 she joined the faculty in the Department of Epidemiology at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Wilkinson’s research focuses on the primary prevention of nicotine use among youth and young adults. She is interested in the relative role that individual-level factors (such as sensation seeking tendencies and depressive symptoms), social factors (such as family / peer behavior), and genetic factors may play in shaping nicotine use. Dr. Wilkinson also is interested in the relationship between acculturation and health behaviors in minority and immigrant populations, and in particular among people of Hispanic heritage. From 2008-14, she was supported by a Career Development award from the National Cancer Institute to study the interactions between, and relative influence of, non-genetic and genetic determinants of smoking initiation among Mexican heritage youth. From 2013-2019 Dr. Wilkinson participated in the Texas Tobacco Center for Regulatory Science (funded by NCI/FDA), serving as the Director of the Pilot Core. She recently completed three NIH-funded grants (from 2019-24) focusing on the role of mental health symptoms in nicotine use. Currently she serves at PI of an NIMHHD funded R01 (from 2022-27), which examines the influences of social media on nicotine use among Mexican American young adults in Texas. Dr, Wilkinson recently completed community-based service grants (2015-17 and 2018-19), and currently is involved in the Texas-based evaluation of SNAP-ED.
Center Affiliation
Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living