Whitney Perkins Witt, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine
Acting Director, Social and Behavioral Sciences Section
Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society, and member,
Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of
Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine
312-503-6842 phone
312-503-5868 fax
w-witt@northwestern.edu
Dr. Whitney P. Witt is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and the Acting Director of the Section on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society. She holds a courtesy faculty appointment at the School of Education and Social Policy. She is also a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research, and a core faculty and Executive Board member of the Northwestern University's newly launched center, Cells to Society (C2S): The Center for Social Disparities and Health.
A health services researcher and epidemiologist, Dr. Witt is broadly interested in the social, behavioral, and psychological factors that contribute to healthy aging across the lifespan. Specifically her research focuses the impact of acute, chronic and terminal illness on the family system and aims to determine how familial relationships influence the health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use of individuals over time. Moreover, the goal of her research is to understand the physiological, behavioral, and social pathways by which health perceptions affect the health of family caregivers and individuals living with illness. Dr. Witt is building a research program to examine caregiver mind-body interactions and how such interactions may help explain health disparities within and between families. Together, this information will help in constructing effective interventions for these families to improve patient health outcomes, reduce health disparities, and address family burden.
She is the Principal Investigator of a five-year career development grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to examine the impact of childhood chronic illness on the family. As part of this work she will assess and compare the level of psychological stress, both self-reported and biologically measured, between parents of children with cancer and parents of children without cancer. Moreover, this study will examine the feasibility, performance, and comparability of stress biomarkers and perceived psychological stress among parental caregivers and how such measures are related to child health outcomes.
Dr. Witt also leads an American Cancer Society-funded pilot study to understand the psychoimmunology of caregiving among family caregivers of prostate cancer patients. The physiological response to such stressors, and the relationship to perceived stress, has not been examined adequately among caregivers of patients with prostate cancer and such research might further help to understand the increased risk for and development of physical and mental health problems in these families.
Funded by the Lynn Sage Cancer Research Foundation, Dr. Witt also directs a study exploring the perceived experience and impact of breast cancer among family caregivers of breast cancer survivors. Using a grounded theory technique, this research employs a qualitative approach to generate hypotheses about the experience of stress and social support among family caregivers of breast cancer survivors.
Most recently, she has started to investigate how the stress of caregiving may be linked to the acceleration of the aging process, specifically examining markers of cellular aging.