Dr. Kumanyika also serves as the Founding Director of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate program in public health studies, as professor of epidemiology in the department of pediatrics-nutrition section at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, senior fellow with the Institute on Aging, senior fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, and faculty associate in the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

Dr. Kumanyika's current and recent studies involve the development and evaluation of culturally appropriate interventions to prevent or treat obesity among African Americans in clinical or community-based settings. Dr. Kumanyika is the principal investigator and director of the Penn-Cheyney EXPORT (Excellence in Partnerships for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities and Training) Center for Inner City Health; a collaboration that involves the Penn Schools of Medicine, Arts and Sciences, Nursing, and Social Work as well as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania's historically black institution located in the Philadelphia area. EXPORT Centers are funded by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health. The Penn-Cheyney EXPORT Center focuses on environmental and behavioral strategies to reduce obesity and related diseases in African American and Latino communities.

Dr. Kumanyika's most widely cited work relates to the epidemiology and management of obesity among black Americans. She is a member of the executive board of the American Public Health Association and the National Institutes of Health Clinical Obesity Research Panel, and was formerly a member of the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board. Dr. Kumanyika was vice chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) expert panel on Diet, Nutrition and Chronic Diseases (2003); and has chaired or cochaired other WHO panels on obesity issues. Since 2002, she has served on the expert panel to review evidence to update the World Cancer Research Fund Report on Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer Report; and she has chaired the Prevention Group of the International Obesity Task Force since 1996. In 2003, Dr. Kumanyika was elected to membership in the American Epidemiological Society and the Institute of Medicine.