As a global health researcher and epidemiologist, Stark, MPH, DrPH, a professor of public health at Washington University School of Public Health, has spent years developing the Refugee Self-Reliance Index — a field-tested instrument now used across multiple countries to assess whether displaced families can support themselves after a crisis. The tool measures 12 domains of household stability, including employment, housing, health, education, social capital, among others. It asks questions that help determine whether someone can rebuild a life: Can the kids go to school? Can you work? Do you have a community?

Now, as a co-director of undergraduate public health education in WashU’s Arts & Sciences, Stark is building something else — WashU’s first undergraduate Public Health & Society program, a collaboration between Arts & Sciences and the School of Public Health that launched last year. The program already has 30 declared majors and 44 minors, with numbers expected to surge when students declare in February. Stark co-directs the program with Tristram R. Kidder, PhD, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor at Arts & Sciences and a member of the secondary faculty at WashU Public Health.

“I’ve always been someone who likes to build things,” Stark said. “When the opportunity arose for the new School of Public Health to develop as its own entity and for the undergraduate public health program to develop independently, I was really honored and excited to be part of both processes.”

The program is co-designed and co-taught by faculty from both schools, combining liberal arts principles with public health perspectives. It aims to prepare students not just for careers in public health or medicine, but to help students bring public health thinking into whatever careers they pursue, whether engineering, business, or another field that doesn’t traditionally place much emphasis on social determinants of health.

“It’s a very innovative undergraduate program that is really unlike anything else around the country,” Stark said. “Students who are going into engineering or business or totally different areas will be able to go into those fields with a public health framing and do new and innovative things.

“We really want to expose students to fundamental principles of liberal arts education,” Stark said. “We want students to write well, to be critical thinkers, to be curious, and have areas of inquiry they want to follow. And we want to introduce them to fundamental principles of public health and expose them to social determinants of health — what does it mean to have a healthy society?”

Here, Stark discusses how she came to public health; her research; and what she learned after the St. Louis tornado destroyed parts of her home.

Q: How did you begin a career in public health?

“As an undergraduate, I majored in anthropology and spent a semester overseas in South Africa during the post-apartheid period. It was a fascinating time of significant social change and momentum within the country, which propelled my interest in global work.

“After graduating, I did a fellowship in Indonesia for nearly two years, another country undergoing significant social change. When I returned, I knew I wanted to continue working in the global space, but I wanted practical skills and tools that would make me useful and allow me to contribute meaningfully.

“That’s what drew me to public health. I looked at international affairs programs and anthropology programs, but public health offered skills that I could see being applicable in a wide range of settings and topics. I wanted to be useful — that’s really what drove me to public health.”

Q: Can you tell us about your research?

“My research sits at the intersection of several areas. One is gender-based violence in conflict and humanitarian settings — particularly violence against women and girls. Another area of focus is mental health and psychosocial well-being, and those two areas are very linked. Then a third area is a focus on refugee and displaced persons’ self-reliance.

“I’ve been working for several years with my colleague, Ilana Seff, (a research associate professor at WashU Public Health) on the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative to develop instruments and tools to measure refugee self-reliance. These have been used in many countries, and we’ve built an impressive global dataset.”

Q: Can you give us examples of how this tool, this initiative, are applied?

“Recently, we’ve been collaborating with partners at Los Andes University in Colombia, focusing on well-being, self-reliance, and gender-based violence among Venezuelan migrants. We’ve partnered with organizations such as Women’s Refugee Commission, Mercy Corps, Blumont, and HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) to evaluate different programs, including a gender transformative family functioning program supporting the safety and well-being of adolescent girls, a rental support initiative providing safe, secure, long-term rental support to Venezuelan migrant women — which has shown improvements across well-being, agency, self-reliance, lower discrimination levels, and higher employment — and an economic strengthening program for Venezuelan migrant women offering training, psychosocial counseling, and seed capital for women to develop their own business ventures.”

Q: Your home was damaged by the tornado here in the spring. How are you doing, and did the tornado and aftermath bring any epiphanies or lessons?

“What I was very aware of as we’ve gone through the many phases of this process is, first, self-reliance. All those domains we ask about in the Self-Reliance Index absolutely came into play: whether our kids could attend school regularly, our own household stability, where we were living, certainly our social capital, our savings and whether we could withstand a shock like this. We were so lucky. We had so many resources at our disposal, much more than the populations I tend to work with. And it was still, and is still, an unbelievably stressful situation to go through, one that’s certainly affected my entire family in different ways. It has given me even more empathy and awareness of how difficult it truly is to go through these kinds of experiences.

“But the most beautiful thing I got from this experience was the community support. I have never appreciated St. Louis and the friendships and support I have the way I do now. I was really floored with the way people showed up. People came to my house when we weren’t even there and hauled away piles of debris in their trucks, they brought us meals, they housed us for months. That was just a beautiful thing to experience. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about social support, building community, and resilience — all of those pieces.”

Writer

Hayley Abshear is the School of Public Health’s digital content strategist and social media coordinator. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Webster University and was previously a freelance writer for national publications and a content creator at a PR firm. She brings almost a decade of experience in writing, content strategy and social media marketing to the team.