Dr. Barkin received her medical degree from the University of Cincinnati Medical College and completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship at UCLA. She serves as the Division Chief of General Pediatrics and, with her team, has created a medical home model to provide high quality care to underserved populations.

Her laboratory studies family-based, community centered clinical interventions to measurably reduce pediatric obesity and in critical windows of childhood. The lab is focused on changing body mass index trajectories in childhood, applying the ecologic model that considers the child in the context of their family, and the family in the context of their community. A theme of the lab is the interaction between behavior, environment and genetics in health outcomes. This lab applies a wide variety of techniques to address these complex problems, including qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The lab considers objective biologic measurements (such as fat mass and BMI), genetic measurements (epigenetic patterns, genetic allelic risk scores), social measurements (social networks), and behavioral measurements (actigraphy and diet changes over time in both parents and children). She serves as the PI of the Growing Right Onto Wellness (GROW) Trial, a 7-year RCT to prevent childhood obesity funded by NHLBI and NICHD and part of the Childhood Obesity Prevention and Treatment Research (COPTR) Consortium. She serves on the Institute of Medicine's Board of Children, Youth, and Families.

In 2008, Dr. Barkin launched a partnership between the Monroe Carell Jr Children's Hospital and Metro Parks and Recreation called the Nashville Collaborative. This partnership serves as a community learning lab to develop and test interventions to measurably reduce pediatric obesity.