Dr. Carol Bryant is a Professor in Community and Family Health at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. Dr. Bryant's interest in social marketing began with the development of a national breastfeeding promotion program for economically disadvantaged minorities and teenagers, called Best Start, in 1990. She has directed social marketing research on a wide variety of public health projects, including breast and cervical cancer screening, prenatal care, immunizations, and early childhood intervention services. She has also directed the formative and pretesting research for five state WIC marketing projects and the National WIC Breastfeeding Promotion Project.
Dr. Bryant also co-directs the Florida Prevention Research Center at the University of South Florida, funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to develop and evaluate a community based approach (CBPM) to social marketing. The CBPM framework is theory-driven, evidence-based, evaluation-refined, and integrated into a center-level logic model. The Florida Prevention Research Center is currently testing the CBPM framework in four demonstration projects: (1) Smoking and drinking prevention program in Sarasota County; (2) Eye safety promotion program among citrus workers in Lee, Collier, Hendry, Glades, and Palm Beach Counties; (3) childhood obesity prevention in Fayette County, Kentucky; and (4) childhood obesity prevention in Sarasota County, Florida. The FPRC is also active in translation and dissemination of research results and training community members, students, and public health practitioners in key elements of CBPM and evidence-based prevention research (http://hsc.usf.edu/nocms/publichealth/prc/ ).
In addition to research, Professor Bryant teaches a variety of graduate level social marketing courses and coordinates the National Social Marketing and Public Health Conference. She is also co-editor of the Social Marketing Quarterly.
