It was 1957 when the late Albert “Mickey” Stunkard, a curious M.D. with a passion for studying weight and eating disorders, joined the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. Soon after, while chair of the department, he founded Penn’s first—and one of the nation’s oldest—clinical and research centers specializing in obesity.

Stunkard recruited a talented team to the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders, including its director for more than 20 years, Thomas Wadden, who recently stepped away from this role and is continuing his work as the Albert J. Stunkard Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry. Wadden significantly impacted the Center and its public reach, closely studying the treatment of obesity by methods such as lifestyle modification, physical activity, medication, and surgery.

“As Dr. Wadden and colleagues established behavioral and combined pharmacologic and behavioral weight management strategies, they laid the groundwork to ensure we’re not just working here in our own Center,” says Kelly Allison, the Center’s director, “that whatever we discover and establish, to make it accessible to those who need it.”

Allison, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor, joined the Center’s team in 2000, and became director at the start of this month. Early in her career, she worked with Stunkard to characterize and test treatments for Night Eating Syndrome, a disorder where people lack hunger in the morning but feel compelled to eat more in the evening and during the night. This work provided the basis for including Night Eating Syndrome in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, in maintaining all the diagnoses, often helps insurance companies recognize disorders and create treatment access for patients.

Not only was the Center the first to run a series of treatment trials, using sertraline, or Zoloft, for Night Eating Syndrome, but it also developed, under Allison’s eye, a cognitive behavioral treatment therapy for those with the eating disorder. Allison continues research on Night Eating Syndrome today, while also managing other studies. Currently, she’s testing the theory that those wanting to lose weight should stop eating after 7 p.m.

Funded by outside grants, research by faculty, predoctoral interns, and postdoctoral fellows working at the Center often informs their clinical work, which includes psychotherapy for eating disorders and weight management, weight loss management groups, and bariatric surgery evaluations.

A recently published study led by the Center’s Rebecca Pearl in Obesity, the journal of The Obesity Society, found that body shaming may be associated with worse health for individuals with obesity who are trying to lose weight. Pearl and colleagues identified a significant relationship between the internalization of weight bias and having a diagnosis of metabolic   syndrome.

“My interactions with patients—hearing them talk about themselves in a critical way—actually led me to pursue this research,” Pearl says. “Stigma is a barrier to improving health behaviors, and we want to make sure we are addressing it and are aware of it when providing behavioral weight loss treatment.”

For as long as he can recall, Wadden, who’s worked at the Center since 1981, says there has always been a stigma against overweight people.

“People often think that weight is under perfect voluntary control, and that if you want to be thin, you could be, and the reason that you’re not is because you’re lazy,” says Wadden. “It’s so far from the truth. What we know now, thanks in part to Stunkard, is that some people come into the world with a genetic predisposition toward obesity just like some people come to the world with a predisposition to be tall. You don’t get to be severely obese just by eating too much.”

It’s surprising, Wadden says, that stigma with regard to obesity—a growing issue for America—has remained.

“Back in 1960, about 12 to 15 percent of people were obese,” he says. “Today, more than 35 percent of U.S. adults are obese, and more than 34 percent are overweight.”

Those kinds of statistics are precisely what make centers trying to tackle this issue so important, and why more centers of its kind have been popping up in recent years, including at Penn.

“When you consider direct medical costs as well as lost productivity,” Wadden says, “obesity is one of the most important problems facing America in terms of health care.”

Allison seconds Wadden’s statement, adding that people with obesity deserve individualized treatment, much like someone with diabetes does.

“It’s a chronic disorder and it’s going to take lifelong management, and people need support in those efforts,” she says.