Melinda S. Southern, Ph.D., M.Ed., C.E.P., is a licensed clinical exercise physiologist and a research faculty member and director of the Pediatric Obesity Clinical Research Section at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. She directs the Prevention of Childhood Obesity Laboratory at the LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. She has published extensively in the field of pediatric obesity and is a member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's Expert Panel on Childhood Obesity.