Deborah C. Glik, Sc.D. FAAHB, is a Full Professor at the UCLA School of Public Health. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, and completed her doctorate in behavioral sciences and public health at Johns Hopkins University in 1985.  She taught at the University of South Carolina before joining UCLA in 1991. She specializes in the planning, and assessment and evaluation of public health education campaigns, material development and popular media projects.  She has over 35 years of experience in conducting research on health behavior change, health communications, formative research, health and media issues, and program evaluation in a variety of settings. At present she has funded research and practice projects in both domestic and global contexts.

Dr. Glik is skilled in the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health education campaigns, materials development and using popular media for health communication. Her program evaluation expertise comprises both quantitative and qualitative research designs.  Substantive areas include disaster preparedness, immunization programs, infectious disease control, maternal and child health, injury control, and adolescent preventive care.  She has created curricula for youth audiences, conducted health and media literacy research, developed multimedia materials, used social media for disease prevention, and worked on numerous risk communication and entertainment education projects. As well she has conducted research on the effectiveness of bioterrorism and emergency response system measures for local state and federal agencies, and is currently working on a national study to assess public health integration with community based organizations for disaster preparedness.

At present she has a number of funded grants and projects and works with a number of   media advocacy groups in Los Angeles who influence entertainment media production linked to health depictions. Current NIH funded research includes a project to influence adolescent health behavior using social media websites in California. http://www.t2x.me/.  An NIH Fogarty behavioral science grant with partners in Senegal West Africa is being used to develop survey research measures to assess adolescents use of internet and digital technology linked to health. She also works as a project lead on  for the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health  Disparities (CPHHD)http://www.ph.ucla.edu/cphhd/ on a community based intervention to change access to healthy foods in East Los Angeles.  She also has funded projects in Public Health Systems Research for Disaster Preparedness and Response (CDC) .

She and colleagues are engaged in an effort to recruit Los Angeles based entertainment writers, directors and producers to provide technical assistance to improve the production quality of a new French West African television serial dramathat addresses  health care issues http://www.ongraes.org/c-est-la-vie-uk.html.  She often takes leadership roles in professional organizations and faculty governance at UCLA, serves on NIH study sections, advisory boards and reviews for academic journals.

In her teaching and advising role Dr. Glik stresses the acquisition of practical, conceptual and analytic skills in health promotion, health communication and applied public health intervention research, so that research is focused on ‘best practices’, and interventions are ‘evidence based’.