Read about SPH people, research and impact.
SPH Blog
Promoting health at the workplace makes sense – after all, more than half of the adults in the U.S. go to a job every day. Peggy Hannon, new director of the School’s Health Promotion Research Center, helps companies adopt wellness programs that improve employee health while also reaching out to those workers most likely to suffer from health inequities. Stress, she says, is another hot workplace topic.
Thomas Fleming was bound for the priesthood, but changed his career pathway when he was inspired by a gifted math teacher and then by a fellow math student who later became his wife. Fleming went on to become a leading biostatistician and a prominent advocate for rigorous evaluation of the benefits and risks of new drugs, biological products and devices.
Why is the Public Health Major so popular?
So many students are interested in health and want to make a difference. We’re giving them broader options to think about how they might be involved in the wellness of their families and their communities beyond traditional ideas of being a physician or clinician.
What is your vision for the department?
My vision has to have a historical aspect to it, as I’ve been on faculty for 25 years and was a student for five years before that. What’s always impressed me is the quality of teaching, particularly epi methods, as well as the quality of research.
Victoria Breckwich Vásquez’s lifelong endeavor has been to understand the challenges faced by her mother, a single mom from Peru who became a nurse in Los Angeles. Today, Vásquez channels her passions into improving the health of Latino communities, including a little-studied group of forestry workers in southern Oregon who are vulnerable to on-the-job injuries.
What impact is the Affordable Care Act having on the way you prepare MHA students as future health care leaders?
The fun thing right now, I think, about the whole Obama-care idea is that it’s forcing the system to think about health care differently. We’ve been paid for years to do things, to treat things – and we’ve gotten really good at that.
Forget cake and ice cream. For her 13th birthday, Judith Wasserheit got a cadaver. The gift was from her mother who, as chair of Special Anatomy at the first Podiatric Medical School in the United States, was able to provide a very special introduction to the human body. The two would dissect the cadaver together on weekends at the morgue.
Noah Simon is developing open-source software that could help other scientists better understand diseases. Ultimately, that could lead to more targeted therapies and better personalized medicine.
India Ornelas has been committed to social justice since high school. Today, she works on interventions to reduce binge drinking among Latino men and enables Navajo communities to grow more vegetables. She also works to create a culture of diversity at the School of Public Health.
Neil Abernethy's research team is developing new software called Outbreak Investigator. "It's a new tool for epidemiologists," he says. "It was set up to follow outbreaks of TB, but it could be used for SARS or pandemic influenza. It could also be used to see how Ebola spreads."
The world is getting fatter, and – despite progress in many countries – more people than ever are smoking. Marie Ng of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) led efforts to gather the evidence for these findings.
Kristie Ebi was among the first experts in the US on global climate change and health. Today she works with developing countries to lessen the impacts of climate change on their populations. She recently joined the School of Public Health to help it address one of its key emerging challenges, global environmental change and health. Despite the doom and gloom projected by many scientific models, Ebi has a positive message about saving lives and becoming a healthier planet.
June Spector grew up playing the violin, and noticed many of her musical friends and colleagues suffering from injuries and fine-motor disorders. As a chemistry student, she saw people exposed to hazardous chemicals in the laboratory. "Those two things made me really wonder about how people stay safe and healthy and work, and how the workforce stays healthy," Spector says.
What motivated you to pursue Alzheimer's research? My dissertation at UW, which I worked on in the early 1980s, focused on the co-occurrence of medical illnesses and depression in elderly patients.
Donna Denno is a pioneering online teacher for the UW, but she rarely posts a lecture. She tells us how she teaches and what drives her to protect vulnerable children across the globe.