Jill Litt

Education

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

Research Interests

• Neighborhoods and health
• Health and psychosocial benefits of community gardens and urban farms
• Nature-based social prescribing
• Environmental and policy change to support pro-health behaviors
• Community-based participatory and interdisciplinary scholarship

About

Dr. Litt is a Professor of Environmental Health in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an Associated Researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).  Dr. Litt received her PhD in environmental health and public policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  She has experience in the area of urban environmental health and neighborhood design. She has worked over the past two decades in the neighborhoods of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver in the United States as well as neighborhoods in Barcelona, Spain and Montpellier and Marseille, France on a variety of issues related to neighborhoods and environment health including urban brownfields cleanup and redevelopment, lead poisoning, residential demolition, environmental justice, chemical risk assessment, and most recently, housing, community gardens, neighborhood greening, local food systems, and nature-based social prescribing. 

As an interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Litt utilizes the methods of community-based participatory research, epidemiology, risk assessment, and ethnography to study the relationships between residential environments and health. In 2018, Dr. Litt was awarded a fellowship with the European Commission to study the relationships between nearby nature and physical health and mental well-being. She is also PI of a 4-year community-level randomized controlled trial (RCT) of community gardening, entitled Community Activation for Prevention (CAPS). The main outcomes of interest include diet, physical activity, physical health, and mental wellbeing. The study is funded by the American Cancer Society (2017-2020). Most recently, Dr. Litt received the Crown Institute Award to design and test a nature-based social prescribing intervention to address loneliness and social isolation among young people in Denver, Colorado, and was selected for funding by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Program to conduct a five-year study of nature-based social prescribing in six urban areas in Ecuador, Finland, Czech Republic, France, Spain, and Australia.

A Note to Prospective Graduate Students

Dr. Litt is not accepting any new graduate applications at this time.