Megan Winkler

Dr. Winkler is a population health scientist and former clinician. Her research centers two socio-structural determinants to population health and health equity-- (1) retail food environments and (2) people’s employment conditions, such as worker rights, pay, and job security.

In her retail food environment work, she studies the social, political, and commercial determinants to our country's ubiquitously unhealthy food environment. The goal is to identify solutions that can transform it for health. Projects have involved assessing inequities in the healthfulness of in-store consumer food environments across neighborhoods; using a commercial determinants of health lens to uncover food & beverage company actions that preserve the status quo; and using a systems science approach (simulation) to illuminate the system-level challenges and opportunties to shift retail towards health.

In her research on people's employment conditions, she focuses on the socio-political contexts (laws, institutional practices) that lead workers to experience precarious employment (low minimum wage, no paid sick leave) and the implications this has for their health and well-being. Leveraging causal inference designs and other social epidemiologic methods, she aims to deliver rigorous, actionable evidence for legislators to best inform their future policy decisions. 

Dr. Winkler received her PhD in Nursing from Duke University and completed her post-doctoral training as a NIH T32 and K99 postdoctoral scholar at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.