Rate My Professor Beth Moracco

Kathryn E. “Beth” Moracco is an associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined the faculty in 2008 and has served as director of the master’s program since 2012. She is the director of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, having previously served as its associate director. Moracco was elected the 26th chair of the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill in April 2023. She holds a BA in Political Science and a Certificate in African Studies from the University of Florida (1984), an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education from UNC Chapel Hill (1992), and a PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education with a minor in Epidemiology from UNC Chapel Hill (1999).

Moracco conducts applied research on the primary and secondary prevention of violence, primarily gender-based violence in global and domestic settings, using qualitative and quantitative methods. Her international work includes five years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on studies evaluating domestic violence protective orders, firearm surrender in such cases, conditional cash transfers for prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission, peer support for resettled refugees, and primary prevention programs addressing sexual perpetration. Moracco is a member of the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Court’s Domestic Violence Committee and a research fellow at UNC Greensboro’s Center for New North Carolinians. She received the Edward G. McGavran Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 and the Edward Graham Kidder Faculty Service Award in 2021. Representative publications include “Conditional cash transfers and uptake of and retention in prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission care: a randomised controlled trial” (2016) and “My First Thought was Croutons”: Perceptions of Cigarettes and Cigarette Smoke Constituents Among Adult Smokers and Nonsmokers (2016).