About Cristin
Dr. Cristin Kearns is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Dentistry and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She is one of the first academics to rigorously study the influence of the sugar industry on health. Her research has been published in high-impact journals including PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology, JAMA Internal Medicine, Science, and The Lancet. She first saw the devastating effects of sugar as a dental director for clinics serving low-income populations and as a manager of dental operations at the Kaiser Permanente Dental Care Program. She has helped identify 600,000 pages of food industry-related documents now available online in the UCSF Library Food Industry Documents Archive (FIDA). The FIDA is modeled after the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, which revolutionized the field of tobacco control by making internal documents accessible to scientists, policymakers, advocates, and the public. Dr. Kearns received a K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research to explore ‘Overcoming Barriers to Implementing Policies to Reduce Sugar Consumption for Dental Caries Prevention’. She was named one of the 32 Most Influential Dentists in the US by Incisal Edge Magazine in 2019 and is a current member of the Lancet Commission on Oral Health. In addition to her DDS degree from the University of North Carolina, and MBA degree from the University of Colorado, Denver, she is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at UCSF.