Amanda Crandall, PhD

Amanda K. Crandall, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her interdisciplinary training spans nutrition (BS), psychology (MS), and public health (PhD), and reflects her commitment to understanding eating behavior across biological, behavioral, and environmental levels of influence. This background grounds her research program, which examines how eating behavior emerges in infancy and evolves across early childhood and adolescence. She is committed to generating evidence that supports families, clinicians, and policymakers in promoting healthy eating trajectories from the very beginning of life.

Dr. Crandall’s work centers on how early feeding experiences, food motivation, and self-regulation interact with environmental stressors—including food insecurity, caregiving context, and family routines—to influence growth and later health. She uses observational methods, behavioral tasks, and advanced analytic approaches to reveal the moment-to-moment processes that guide infant satiation, feeding interactions, and developing inhibitory control. By attending to both proximal interactions and broader social and structural conditions, her work clarifies how environmental pressures shape eating behavior development and disease risk.