Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA

For the last decade, Dr. Kearns has been working to establish food industry documents research as a new area of investigation that transforms the way people think about sugar and the sugar industry’s role in promoting health inequities related to dental caries, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. In 2018, her research and document collecting efforts culminated in the launch of the UCSF Food Industry Documents Archive (FIDA), a collection of more than 600,000 sugar-industry related documents, which is part of the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL). The IDL is a digital archive of documents created by industries that influence public health. Originally established in 2002 to house the millions of documents publicly disclosed in litigation between US States and the seven major tobacco industry organizations, the collections have been expanded to include documents from the food, drug, chemical, and fossil fuel industries. UCSF has a long and continuing history of excellence in research on the commercial determinants of health built around the IDL. Dr. Kearns is part of a core group of faculty engaged in innovative documents-based analyses that have been influential in the public, academic, and policymaking spheres.