Contributions to Public Health
I am a social epidemiologist who uses innovative and collaborative methods to understand the social mechanisms that link community environments to alcohol-related harms. I incorporate methods throughout my research that allow me to understand mechanisms rather than simply assessing correlates. The long-term goal of my research is to develop environmentally-based prevention programs to reduce harms related to substance use. My research contributes to this goal by investigating:
- Contributions of structural conditions to inequities in alcohol-related harms: Alcohol inequities stem not just from individual-level mechanisms, but from structural, mutually reinforcing, systems promoted by societies. These structural determinants influence more proximal risk factors, such as current neighborhood risks and supports. I aim to reduce inequities in alcohol-related harms by exploring the contributions of modifiable environmental conditions.
- Spatial and geographical dimensions of substance use and related problems: In my research I have utilized a social ecologic framework and state-of-the-art spatial methods to more precisely identify where and for whom specific geographic features impact substance use and related problems.
- How to best use collaborative systems science approaches to understand social mechanisms that link community environments to alcohol consumption and related harms: My current R01, Collaborator-Designed Agent-Based Models to Inform Alcohol-Involved Sexual Violence Prevention on College Campuses (AA029379), uses and integrates collaborative model-building and agent-based models, an innovative, empirically-based approach that can improve implementation of effective strategies, promote preventive interventions, and stimulate policy and programmatic changes to reduce sexual violence among students.
- The role of drinking contexts in alcohol-related problems: Patterns of alcohol consumption, such as how often and how much one drinks, and related harms, such as sexual violence and driving after drinking, vary substantially across contexts. Risks are related to social and physical environmental characteristics, a person’s drinking in those contexts, and the drinking of others in those contexts. Understanding and explicating these very specific contextual relationships has been a goal of my work.
Education
- Brown University, Providence, RI; Sc.B., 2003; Environmental Science, focus in Environmental Health
- University of Washington, Seattle, WA; MPH, 2005; Epidemiology
- University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Ph.D., 2009; Epidemiology
- University of Michigan Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, Ann Arbor, MI; Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2009
- University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, Berkeley, CA; Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012; NIAAA T32 at the Prevention Research Center focused on Environmental Approaches to Prevention
- NIH-CDC Institute on Systems Science and Health, 2011
- Human-Centered Design Practitioner Institute, Luma Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, 2022
Teaching
BCHS 3100 Grant Writing
BCHS 3015 Community Mapping and Introductory Spatial Analysis
BCHS 2991 Multilevel Analysis in Public Health
Selected Publications
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