Deborah Salvo

Deborah Salvo, PhD, is an assistant professor of public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a faculty scholar of the Prevention Research Center, the Center for Diabetes Translation Research, and the Institute for Public Health. Before this appointment, she held positions at the University of Texas School Health Science Center in Austin, Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, and the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico.

Salvo is a native of Mexico City, Mexico, and earned her bachelor’s degree in nutrition and food sciences from Universidad Iberoamericana. She earned her doctorate in biological and biomedical sciences (nutrition and health sciences, public health and epidemiology track) from Emory University in 2013. Her interests lie in understanding the role of built environment on physical activity and health, and in using this evidence to resolve global health disparities. Her work ranges from local projects to multisite international consortia. She has expertise in using, improving, and developing novel methodological approaches that combine physical activity and spatial epidemiological tools to address complex questions on the effects of context on health. Throughout her career, she has facilitated and led international collaborations to support the growth of the field of physical activity and public health on a global scale, with special emphasis on low- and middle-income countries and populations.

Salvo is the current chair of the Council on Environment and Physical Activity within the International Society for Physical Activity and Health. She is also part of the steering committee of the Global Observatory for Physical Activity, and she is an active member of the Our Voice Global Network. Salvo serves as associate editor for Preventing Chronic Disease, an official scientific journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Throughout her career, she has served as technical advisor on physical activity and the built environment for several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fogarty International Center within the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico, and the World Health Organization. Salvo was a contributing author to the second series on physical activity published by The Lancet in 2016, which convened global experts to present the latest evidence of the important role of physical activity for public health.