Barbara A. Israel, Dr.P.H. is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the School of Public Health - University of Michigan. She received her Doctorate in Public Health and Master in Public Health degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been on the faculty at the School of Public Health since 1982, and is the Deputy Editor of Health Education & Behavior. Dr. Israel has published widely in the areas of community-based participatory research, community empowerment, evaluation, stress and health, and social networks. Many of her research investigations and publications have examined the relationship among stress, social support, perceived control and physical and mental health status.

Dr. Israel has extensive experience conducting community-based participatory research in collaboration with partners in diverse ethnic communities. She is Principal Investigator of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center, funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which she is involved in a community-based participatory research effort in Detroit, Michigan, aimed at both examining the relationship between stress, conditioning variables and health status, and conducting and evaluating an intervention aimed at reducing stressors and strengthening protective factors within the community. She is also Principal Investigator of the Michigan Center for the Environment and Children's Health, funded through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency, with the overall goal to conduct collaborative community-based basic and intervention research that increases knowledge of the determinants of and strategies for reducing environmental factors associated with childhood asthma.