Lara B. McKenzie, PhD, MA, FAAHB

Dr. McKenzie’s research interests in the field of public health broadly include social and behavioral sciences and child injury prevention and control. To date, her research has focused on the health of children and the prevention of injury, with specific attention to injuries that occur in and around the home as well as the delivery of injury prevention interventions in the pediatric emergency department and the community. More recently her team has focused on how parents seek injury prevention information and the ways that professionals can share injury prevention information on social media to maximize parent understanding and engagement. Dr. McKenzie has developed and evaluated a mobile technology-based intervention for increasing parents’ safety knowledge and actions. She and her team have published extensively on injuries associated with various consumer products as well as sports and activity-related injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments.

Publications

Lara B. McKenzie, PhD, MA, FAAHB, is a Principal Investigator and the Director of the Training and Education Core in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Dr. McKenzie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine and the Division of Epidemiology, College of Public Health at The Ohio State University.

Dr. McKenzie's research program focuses on how to increase adoption of parent safety behaviors such as the use of carbon monoxide alarms, smoke alarms, child safety seats and booster seats to prevent and/or reduce the consequences of childhood injuries. Dr. McKenzie's research also focuses on injuries associated with consumer products and sports and activity-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments.

Dr. McKenzie and her team focus on innovative solutions to home and child safety including the Make Safe Happen™ app which has been downloaded more than 65,000 times and a patent for a child-resistant spray bottle.