Rate My Professor Renée Umstattd Meyer

M. Renée Umstattd Meyer is a Professor of Public Health and Senior Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education in the Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences at Baylor University. She earned her BSE in community health from Baylor University in 2000, graduating from the Honors program, MS in health promotion from the University of Mississippi in 2002, and PhD in health promotion, education, and behavior from the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in 2005. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the psychology of physical activity at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006 and served as an assistant professor in the Department of Health Science at the University of Alabama from 2006 to 2010. Umstattd Meyer joined Baylor University in 2010 as an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health, was promoted to associate professor in 2014, served as graduate program director and associate professor from 2018 to 2020, and has held the position of professor and associate dean for research since 2020.

Her research specializations include physical activity, active living, and sedentary behavior, with emphasis on advancing access to healthy living opportunities among underserved rural communities through community-engaged mixed-methods research, as well as policy, systems, and environmental strategies. She leads the Rural Hub of the CDC-funded Physical Activity Policy Research and Evaluation Network and co-chaired dissemination efforts for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Physical Activity Research Center. Umstattd Meyer is a Fellow and Past-President of the American Academy of Health Behavior, holds Master Certified Health Education Specialist certification, and has received honors such as Outstanding Research Poster at the AAHB 22nd Annual Meeting. Key publications include A scoping review of policies to encourage breastfeeding, healthy eating, and physical activity among rural people and places in the United States (BMC Public Health, 2024), Implementation characteristics that may promote sustainability of a rural physical activity initiative: Examination of Play Streets (Implementation Science Communications, 2024), and authored guides such as the Guide to Implementing Play Streets in Rural Communities (2019) and the Guide to Activating Rural America through Active Living Policies (2021). She has served as managing co-editor of Health Behavior and Policy Review and on editorial boards for Health Behavior Research and the Journal of Healthy Eating and Active Living.