Dr. Deborah Tate is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown Medical School. She earned her Bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary, and earned her Master's degree and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology (1999) from Virginia Tech. She completed her internship in Behavioral Medicine at Brown University and served as a representative to the Brown University Consortium Training Committee. She was an American Diabetes Association (ADA) Mentor-based Fellow with Dr. Rena Wing prior to becoming a faculty member at Brown.

Dr Tate’s main research area is in developing alternatives to standard clinical treatments for obesity incorporating technology and informatics. She also has an interest in developing health communications that are tailored or specific to the needs of individual patients using computer programs. 

Recently, Dr. Tate completed an exciting study to develop and evaluate the initial efficacy of an Internet behavioral weight loss program using electronic counseling. She received the Brown post-doctoral research award, a Society of Behavioral Medicine Citation award, and has been recognized in the national media for her work in this exciting area. The results of this study have recently been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

Dr. Tate is now the Principal Investigator on a 3-year study funded by the American Diabetes Association to further develop Internet behavior therapy for weight loss and to test the effectiveness of this treatment. She is co-investigator on an NIH funded study to compare a web-based weight maintenance program with a face-to-face intervention and a no-treatment control and is a co-investigator on several other mediated intervention studies for weight loss and physical activity.  She is currently working on a study with Dr. Rena Wing to examine tailored communications for weight loss.

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dtate@lifespan.org