Conrad Lyford, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University.
One of the largest challenges I see in the obesity field is to develop innovative and effective solutions to this epidemic. My goal in health care research is to develop research that helps speed and establish treatments and methods that have a positive effect on mortality, quality of life and economics towards implementation. To this end, I have led or been part of teams that have developed or are experimenting with different approaches towards helping to address the obesity epidemic and preventing cancer. Recently, I led a team with the goal of developing a model for cancer prevention in rural communities. A key part of this was to develop multi-portal reinforcements for desired behavior including the use of point of purchase information in the supermarket. At the same time, I’ve been part of team focused on assessing the effect of aspirin on health, mortality and cost which hopefully will provide an important stepping stone in the process of getting this strategy accepted in an appropriate way for an average risk population.