Weekly news from the School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis
Dear colleagues,
Space moves
As we move to settle our space footprint in 4300 Duncan and Hillman Hall, all of our primary faculty and senior staff have now received an email from our associate dean of administration — Sunghei Han — outlining next steps. Different faculty and staff will be moving on different schedules as we partner with the Brown School on their commensurate moves. Our goal is to have everyone resettled in their new spaces by early August barring unanticipated construction delays. All research staff should be coordinating with faculty who lead their particular research groups, and all administrative staff with the senior staff member who heads up each operational group.
Three notes of gratitude. First, to our colleagues in the Brown School. Teams in both schools have been working hard to coordinate, and I am immensely grateful always for the Brown School’s partnership. Second, to Sunghei Han for leading us through this effort. And third, to all of our faculty and staff for your forbearance as we make this move happen. If there are any questions about the moves, please do send a note to Sunghei. As always, I am available to engage if there are questions, ways I can help.
The coming week
SPH photos for faculty and staff, postponed in the aftermath of the tornado, have been rescheduled for Thursday, June 5, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sessions will be scheduled in 10-minute increments and held on the lower level of the patio by the parking garage, between Sumers Welcome Center and Weil Hall. If you would like to have your photo taken, send an email to SPH photographer Zach Linhares, and please copy Tamara Schneider, our assistant director of communications. There will be future opportunities for photos for those who cannot make it this week.
Joining the School of Public Health
We welcome new faculty members to the School of Public Health this month.
Jessica Backman-Levy, PhD, MPH, joins us as a professor of practice at the School of Public Health, from the Brown School. An expert on the relationship between gender, poverty and health in global contexts, Backman-Levy works with governmental and nongovernmental organizations to enhance gender equality and improve health and development outcomes worldwide.
Kate Barbier, MSW, MPH, joins the School of Public Health from the Brown School as a lecturer on the teaching track and the director of applied practice. She brings more than a decade of experience in public health practice, overseeing student practica, and supporting students and community partners alike.
Derek Brown, PhD, joins as a professor at the School of Public Health. A health economist, he comes to us from the Brown School. He uses economic methods to study child health and health behaviors, with a goal of improving the valuation of health outcomes and policies.
Charlene Caburnay, PhD, joins the School of Public Health from the Brown School as an associate professor of practice and director of the master’s program. Through her work at the Health Communication Research Laboratory, she designs, develops and evaluates health communication programs in communities burdened by disease and poverty.
Bill Effah, MD, MPH, MBA, joins the School of Public Health from the Brown School as a lecturer on the teaching track. His work is focused on developing scalable, cost-effective, and innovative health strategies and technology tools for managing infectious and chronic diseases in low-resource settings.
Patrick Fowler, PhD, joins us a professor at the School of Public Health. He directs the Doctoral Program in Public Health Sciences and co-directs the Division of Computational and Data Sciences. Fowler’s research integrates community and data sciences to prevent homelessness and its harmful effects on children, families and neighborhoods.
Rachel Garg, PhD, joins as an assistant professor at the School of Public Health. She comes from the Brown School, where she studied how unmet social needs, such as housing instability and food insecurity, impact health outcomes and behaviors such as smoking cessation.
Ross Hammond, PhD, joins the school as the Distinguished Professor in Public Health Systems Science. Previously a faculty member at the Brown School, Hammond uses mathematical and computational methods to understand and address a broad range of public health problems and promote health equity.
Ragini Maddipati, MSW, MPH, joins the school as a senior lecturer on the teaching track. She will oversee the school’s dual-degree academic programs. Maddipati comes to us from the Brown School, where she served as the assistant dean for assessment.
Ginger McKay, MA, PhD, joins us as an assistant professor at the School of Public Health. She comes to us from the Brown School. Her research is centered around the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based practices, with a particular focus on sustaining effective interventions and de-implementing ineffective or harmful practices in the context of infectious disease and cancer.
Amy McQueen, PhD, joins as a professor at the School of Public Health. She comes to us from WashU Medicine. A social psychologist, she studies the interplay between health behaviors and cognitive, psychosocial, and environmental determinants with a goal of finding innovative ways to promote individual- and systems-level change to promote health.
Ilana Seff, DrPH, MPH, joins as a research associate professor at the School of Public Health. Coming to us from the Brown School, she studies the prevention of violence against women and girls, particularly in humanitarian settings, social norms related to violence, and the psychosocial well-being and mental health of refugees and displaced populations.
Morgan Shields, PhD, MSc, joins as an assistant professor at the School of Public Health. Formerly of the Brown School, she researches the quality and accountability of behavioral health care, with a particular focus on identifying policies that motivate and support quality improvement in vulnerable settings.
Joe Steensma, EdD, joins the School of Public Health as a professor of practice. Formerly of the Brown School, he aims to bridge the gap between research and real-world application by commercializing innovative products and services that address pressing public health challenges.
Emmanuel Tetteh, MD, joins as a research assistant professor at the School of Public Health. An infectious diseases epidemiologist formerly at the Brown School, he applies implementation research and systems science methods to enhance health-care delivery in routine-care settings, with a focus on people living with HIV in resource-limited settings.
Jean-Francois Trani, PhD, joins as a professor at the School of Public Health. Also formerly of the Brown School, he is motivated by the goal of improving the well-being of people with disabilities. He investigates inequities in structural and social determinants of health, in particular unemployment, exclusion from education and health, processes of multidimensional poverty, limited life opportunities and overall social exclusion that disproportionately burdens people with disabilities and older adults.
Public Health Ideas
A video of my conversation with Elvin Geng, MD, MPH, a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health and a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at WashU Medicine, about a paper he co-authored, “HIV epidemiology, prevention, treatment, and implementation strategies for public health.” The paper was published in The Lancet.
SPH in the Record
As the city of Rolla, Mo., debated whether to remove fluoride from its water, former Rolla resident Renee Parks, a senior research manager at the School of Public Health, and her colleagues at the Prevention Research Center (PRC) worked to make sure that city officials had the information they needed to make informed choices. PRC team members created a tailored infographic with clear, accurate, nonpartisan information on the health effects of water fluoridation and collaborated with local groups to get it in front of decision-makers. Ultimately, the Rolla City Council voted May 19 to preserve fluoride in the city’s water supply. See here for more on the PRC’s efforts.
Public health news
Last month, we co-hosted a Washington University Ideas event alongside the 78th World Health Assembly in Geneva. The talk and panel discussion, hosted in collaboration with Quality Evidence for Health System Transformation (QuEST) Network and the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, focused on data from the 21-country People’s Voice Survey and what they reveal about how people around the world experience their health systems. For more on what we can learn from listening to people in evaluating health systems, see here.
Perhaps of interest
NPR’s Planet Money aired an episode on May 28 titled, “Why does the federal government fund research at universities?” that aimed to put the recent federal research cuts into context. The episode, which used WashU as an example of a premiere research institution, features an interview with Chancellor Andrew D. Martin. Listen here.
I enjoyed speaking with Jesse Dylan and Priscilla Cohen, on the Wondros Podcast, about health, freedom, and navigating tradeoffs in pursuit of a healthier world. A link to the episode on YouTube.
Some thoughts on how the public health establishment handled, and mishandled, criticism of COVID-era policies, in this Undark article about Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Also this week
In The Healthiest Goldfish, some thoughts on the underrated value of sincerity.
To the new month.
Warmly,
Sandro
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Margaret C. Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health
Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health
Vice-provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives
Washington University in St Louis
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