Andrea Bombak

Dr. Andrea Bombak joined the arts faculty in July 2018. She received her degrees and post-doctoral training from the Universities of Calgary and Manitoba. Prior to her appointment at the University of New Brunswick, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Health Sciences at Central Michigan University.

Research interests

Dr. Bombak is a critical weight, health services, and public health scholar whose research critically explores messaging and policy concerning the ‘obesity epidemic’ and the lived experience of weight stigma. She has led qualitative projects on bariatric surgery, body acceptance, weight stigma, and understandings of weight and health in Canada and rural America.

Presently, she is the principal investigator of a New Brunswick Health Research Foundation and Banting Discovery Award-funded study that explores weight stigma and health inequities as experienced by marginalized populations in New Brunswick and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project that examines how food is discussed in post-secondary curricula.

She is also a co-investigator on a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded, mixed-method research program exploring attitudes toward sugar-sweetened beverages and related taxation in Canadian Indigenous (on and off-reserve) and non-Indigenous communities (PI: Dr. Natalie Riediger, University of Manitoba) with additional projects in India and rural Michigan (PI: Bombak).

Selected publications

Bombak AE, Meadows A, Billette J*. Fat Acceptance 101: Perceptions of cultural body acceptance among higher-weight women in America’s Midwest. Health Sociology Review (Published online: April 16, 2019).

Bombak AE, Riediger ND, Bensley JH, Ankomah S Mudryj AN. A systematic search and critical thematic, narrative review of lifestyle interventions for the prevention and management of diabetes. Critical Public Health (Published online: September 9, 2018).

Monaghan LF, Bombak AE, Rich E. 2018. Obesity, neoliberalism and epidemic psychology: critical commentary and alternative approaches to public health. Critical Public Health 28(5):498-508.

Riediger ND, Bombak, AE. 2018. Sugar-sweetened beverages as the new tobacco: examining a proposed tax policy through a Canadian social justice lens CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale Canadienne: 190(11):E327-E330.

Bombak AE, Monaghan LF. 2017. Obesity, bodily change and health identities: A qualitative study of Canadian women. Sociology of Health and Illness 39:923-40.

Bombak AE, McPhail D (Co-first authors), Ward P. 2016. Reproducing stigma: interpreting “overweight” and “obese” women’s experiences of weight-based discrimination in reproductive healthcare. Social Science & Medicine 166:94-101.

McPhail D, Bombak AE. 2015. Fat, queer and sick? A critical analysis of ‘lesbian obesity’ in public health discourse. Critical Public Health. 25(5):539-553. doi:10.1080/09581596.2014.992391.

Bombak AE. 2014. Obesity, Health-at-Every-Size, and public health policy. American Journal of Public Health 104(2): e60–e67. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2013.301486.

Supervision areas

• Weight Stigma
• Qualitative Health Research
• Health Inequities
• Critical Health Policy
• The Aging Body
• Health Services
• Gender and Health
• Self-perceptions of Health