Kathryn Yount

Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Global Health

Dr. Kathryn Yount is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Global Health (2012) and Professor of Global Health and Sociology (2015) at Emory University. Her research centers on the social determinants of women’s health, including mixed-methods evaluations of social-norms and empowerment-based programs to reduce gender-based violence and health disparities in underserved communities. She has been funded continuously since 2002 from U.S. federal agencies, private foundations, and foreign agencies to work in parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Atlanta. These partnerships have contributed 300 publications in the social sciences and global health.

Dr. Yount is a world-class educator, mentor, and researcher whose work has been recognized through several university-wide awards, including the Women of Excellence award for Mentoring from the Center for Women at Emory (2016), Marian V. Creekmore Award for Internationalization (2021), Eleanor Main Graduate Mentor Award from the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies (2023), and Albert E. Levy Senior Faculty award for research excellence (2024). Dr. Yount served as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Population Association of America (2018-2020), advisor for DfID- and BMGF-funded women’s empowerment and GBV prevention initiatives, and member of the DfID-funded Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) consortium. Based on bibliometric reviews, Dr. Yount is among the most influential researchers of women's empowerment and partner violence in the world. She serves as PI (with MPI Le Minh Giang) of the Fogarty/NIH D43 grant CONVERGE, which is training the next generation of science leaders in the prevention of gender-based violence and violence against children in Vietnam and is PI of SCALE, a national implementation trial of an efficacious sexual violence prevention program being implemented with universities across Vietnam. Dr. Yount is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Population's Ad Hoc Committee conducting a Panel Study of Women's Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Socioeconomic Development (2022-2024) and an elected Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 2023).

At Emory, the university faculty elected Dr. Yount to serve as President of the University Senate and Chair of the University Faculty Council (2015), where she led the initiative to develop formal university-wide tenure and promotion guidelines. She has served as a member of Provost-appointed committees to revise university policies on authorship, scholarship, mentorship, and ethics in research; a member of all major graduate scholarship committees for the Laney Graduate School, and Chair of the Social Sciences Sub-committee, University Research Committee, which awards funding for faculty research. The graduate faculty elected Dr. Yount to serve on the Executive Council of the Laney Graduate School to advise the Dean on graduate policies, curricular revisions, and new courses and programs (2019-2022).

Dr. Yount lives in Atlanta with her twin daughters and husband. Connect with her and her team on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.