Tuesday, September 12, 2017
8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Hiebert Lounge
72 East Concord Street
Boston
#BUSPHSymposia
Live-Streaming Available During Event
Communities are increasingly recognized as critical determinants of health and well-being. Commensurate with growing scholarship in the area, several leading health professional schools have developed academic concentrations in community health sciences. This emerging field includes a breadth of disciplines ranging from anthropology to sociology and an array of content foci ranging from social context and health behaviors to maternal and child health. Not only does this diverse field provide tremendous opportunities, but it also presents complex new challenges. The Dean’s Symposium will bring together faculty from across the nation to discuss the future of community health sciences, aiming to better map the remit and scope of the field.
Agenda
8:30 a.m. – 9 a.m.
Breakfast and Informal Greetings
9 a.m. – 9:05 a.m.
WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health
9:05 a.m. – 9:15 a.m.
THE LANDSCAPE OF COMMUNITY HEALTH SCIENCES
Chair and Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health
9:15 a.m. – 10 a.m.
PLENARY SESSION
Academic-Community Collaborations to Reduce Inequities: Lessons from Community-Based Participatory Research
Nina Wallerstein
Director, Center for Participatory Research, and Professor of Public Health, College of Population Health, University of New Mexico
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Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, Professor of Public Health, College of Population Health, and Director, Center for Participatory Research (http://cpr.unm.edu), University of New Mexico, has been developing community-based participatory research (CBPR) and empowerment/Freirean interventions for over 30 years. Her more than 140 publications include Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity (3rd edition, 2017) and Problem-Posing at Work: A Popular Educator’s Guide. In 2016, she received the inaugural Community Engaged Research Lecture award from the University of New Mexico Office of the Vice President for Research. Wallerstein has worked in North American and Latin American contexts in family, youth, and women’s health intervention research; in the participatory evaluation of healthy municipalities; and with tribal partners to support culturally centered research in New Mexico and the United States. She is currently co-Principal Investigator of a NIDA-funded intergenerational family prevention program with children, parents, and elders in three Southwestern tribes. To improve the science of CBPR and reduce health inequities, she is Principal Investigator of an NINR-funded RO1 to research best partnering practices associated with health outcomes and to develop a partnership evaluation/reflection toolkit. Wallerstein has collaboratively produced with Latin American colleagues a train-the-trainer Empowerment, Participatory Research, and Health Promotion curriculum (initially sponsored by the Pan American Health Organization), which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and she co-sponsors an annual summer Institute in CBPR for Health at the University of New Mexico.
10 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
SUBSTANCE USE AND HIV: PANEL DISCUSSION
Disparities in Access to HIV Prevention Innovations Affecting People Who Inject Drugs
Assistant Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health
The Role of Syndemic Barriers in HIV Care and Treatment Strategies among Women Living with HIV/AIDS
Jamila K. Stockman
Director, Center for AIDS Research Disparities Core, and Associate Professor, Division of Global Public Health, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego
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Jamila K. Stockman is an associate professor and vice chief in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, Department of Medicine, at the University of California, San Diego. She is also director of the Disparities Core at UC San Diego’s Center for AIDS Research. Stockman received her PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MPH degree from the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Stockman has dedicated her research career towards improving the lives of women with experiences of intimate partner and sexual violence. An epidemiologist by training, Stockman focuses her research on the intersecting epidemics of intimate partner violence and sexual violence, HIV acquisition and transmission, and substance abuse among marginalized populations. She is working to advance understanding of the underlying immunological and physiological mechanisms linking these epidemics and develop interventions that provide maximal reductions in HIV, substance abuse, and violence against women. Currently, her work is conducted in the US, US-Mexico border region, Latin America, and Caribbean. In addition to her research, Stockman actively collaborates with local public health departments and community-based organizations to ensure ethical and cultural appropriateness of her research among members of the community, as well as serves on various domestic violence steering committees and community-based organizations working to address the deleterious effects of violence and HIV in families and relationships.Beyond “Just Say No”: Novel Strategies in Adolescent Substance Misuse Prevention
Margie Skeer (SSW’01, SPH’03)
Associate Professor, Public Health and Community Medicine, School of Medicine, Tufts University
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Margie Skeer, ScD, MPH, MSW, is an Associate Professor and the Interim Director of the Master of Science in Health Communication at the Tufts University School of Medicine in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. She received her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health and did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. Skeer has been in the field of substance use and addiction for over 20 years, and her current research focuses on adolescent substance misuse prevention, both from epidemiologic and intervention-development perspectives. Her research has a particular focus on family engagement and the role that family meals play in adolescent risk prevention. She has been the PI on multiple studies to develop and test interventions, which have spanned conducting qualitative research in rural Idaho to developing a methamphetamine-use prevention communication intervention for teens through dental practices, and testing the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of a substance-use preventive intervention geared toward parents of 3rd–6th grade students in the Boston Public Schools through a pilot randomized controlled trial. She also collaborates on studies around comorbid HCV and HIV infection among people who inject drugs. A current interest is the effects of the new recreational marijuana policies on adolescent initiation. Finally, Skeer teaches graduate courses on substance use and addiction for public health and medical students.
10:45 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
SUBSTANCE USE AND HIV: DISCUSSANT
Lisa Metsch
Stephen Smith Professor and Chair, Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
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Lisa Metsch, PhD, is the Stephen Smith Professor and Chair of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. Metsch’s current work focuses on developing innovative strategies to increase the uptake of HIV testing, linkage, retention, re-engagement in care, and viral suppression among vulnerable populations. Metsch is the multiple PI of the Florida Node Alliance in the NIDA-funded Clinical Trials Network, where she led studies on HIV testing in substance-use disorder treatment programs. She recently completed a study of out-of-care HIV-infected drug users recruited from the inpatient (hospital) setting and tested strategies to link and retain them to HIV care (viral suppression is the primary outcome). Since moving to Columbia University in 2012, Metsch has established a Miami-based Columbia University Research Center with Miami-based faculty and staff, and she and her team are leading several ongoing studies related to the HIV care continuum among substance users at risk and living with HIV. Metsch is also a multiple PI of the Miami site of the NIH-funded Women’s Interagency HIV Study. Her findings on the value of integrating HIV testing in substance-use treatment programs were the basis for SAMHSA and NIDA to develop an HIV awareness toolkit for substance-use treatment providers. The CDC used her research on HIV testing in the decision to decouple risk reduction counseling and HIV testing. Mentoring is a major part of Metsch’s research program. With Nabila El-Bassel, she directs a NIDA-funded training program for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows that focuses on HIV, substance use, and the criminal justice system.
11:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Break
11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Overvalued Cures: A New Narrative for Achieving a Healthy Society
Robert M. Kaplan
Former Chief Science Officer, US Agency for Health Care Research and Quality; Director of Research, Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford School of Medicine
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Robert M. Kaplan, PhD, has served as Chief Science Officer at the US Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) and as Associate Director of the National Institutes of Health, where he led the behavioral and social sciences programs. He is also a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Health Services and Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he led the UCLA/RAND AHRQ health services training program and the UCLA/RAND CDC Prevention Research Center. He was Chair of the Department of Health Services from 2004 to 2009. From 1997 to 2004, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is a past President of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association Division of Health Psychology, Section J of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Pacific), the International Society for Quality of Life Research, the Society for Behavioral Medicine, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Kaplan is a former Editor-in-Chief of Health Psychology and of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. His 20 books and over 530 articles or chapters have been cited more than 32,000 times (H-index>93), and the ISI includes him in the listing of the most cited authors in his field (defined as above the 99.5th percentile). Kaplan is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine). He is currently Regenstrief Distinguished Fellow at Purdue University and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where he serves as Director of Research at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC).
12:15 p.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Lunch and Discussion
12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
VIOLENCE: PANEL DISCUSSION
I’m Not From Here and I’m Not the Expert: Trying to Not Have What It Doesn’t Take to Be a Successful CBPR Researcher
Associate Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health
Addressing Trauma Exposure Among Boys and Men of Color: The Case for Optimal Development
Phillip W. Graham
Senior Director, Drugs, Violence, and Delinquency Prevention Research Program, Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience, RTI International
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Phillip W. Graham, DrPH, MPH, is Senior Director of RTI International’s Drugs, Violence, and Delinquency Prevention (DVDP) Research Program within the Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience (JSR). He has over 20 years of experience conducting community-based research and evaluation. Since joining RTI, Graham has directed or collaborated on several projects focusing on the prevention of adolescent interpersonal violence and substance use. He has investigated the effects of witnessing community violence, the development of ethnic identity among African American male adolescents, the effectiveness of science-based interventions to reduce youth substance use, the impact of comprehensive school-based interventions and services to promote healthy child development, and the relationship between social capital and community violence. Graham currently directs several large-scale national cross-site evaluations of communities’ efforts to build prevention infrastructure and leverage existing resources to reduce substance abuse and related problems using evidence-based strategies. He also leads an effort to develop an evaluation toolkit that will allow stakeholders to more effectively evaluate the unique dimensions of collective impact as well as a study to develop better measures of community social cohesion and shared values for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) Culture of Health initiative. His methodological focus includes the use of mixed-methods approaches, and his research emphasizes the importance of community context, systems change, and place-based strategies. Graham also has strong practical interest in promoting communities to use data-driven decision-making processes, conduct needs assessment, select evidence-based prevention strategies (individual programs and environmental strategies), and build local evaluation capacity. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees in Maternal and Child Health (MCH) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Public Health.Innovating Gang Violence Prevention with Machine Learning and Qualitative Methods
Desmond Upton Patton
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Columbia University
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Desmond Upton Patton, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate of the Social Intervention Group (SIG) and the Data Science Institute. His research utilizes qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine how and why gang violence, trauma, grief, and identity are expressed on social media and the real-world impact they have on well-being for low-income youth of color. His current research projects examine how gang-involved youth conceptualize threats on social media as well as the extent to which social media shapes and facilitates youth and gang violence. In partnership with the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, Patton is developing a natural language processing tool for detecting aggression and grief in social media posts. His research on Internet Banging has been discussed nationally on media outlets, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, NPR, Boston Magazine, ABC News, and more. Patton also provides expert witness testimony using social media during court trials. He was recently cited in an amici curiae brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in the Elonis v. United States case, which examined the issues of interpreting threats on social media.
1:30 p.m. – 2 p.m.
VIOLENCE: DISCUSSANT
Emily J. Ozer
Professor, Community Health Sciences, University of California Berkeley School of Public Health
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Emily J. Ozer, PhD, is a clinical-community psychologist, Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and cofounder of the Innovations for Youth (I4Y) Center. She is the author of more than 60 scientific papers in areas such as participatory research, trauma and resilience, and school-based interventions; funders of her research include NIDA, NICHD, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the CDC. Learning experiences with participatory research in India and Latin America were formative in inspiring her research program with dual foci on youth-led participatory research and psychological resiliency in the face of stress and trauma. Ozer seeks to develop equitable and sustained collaborations with community partners to challenge rigid notions of evidence and to highlight the role of multiple methods and insider expertise in understanding and changing the conditions for the positive development of marginalized adolescents and their communities.
2 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Break
2:15 p.m. – 3 p.m.
MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH: PANEL DISCUSSION
‘You Should Treat Me Like Glass’: What Women and Big Data Tell Us About Gaps in Women’s Health and Health Care
Associate Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health
Micro-Economic Interventions to Prevent HIV in Vulnerable Young Women and Adolescents
Larissa Jennings
Assistant Professor, International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
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Larissa Jennings, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Social and Behavioral Interventions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of International Health. She is trained as a social and behavioral scientist in population, family, and reproductive health. Jennings has over ten years of research and programming experience in studying the role of economic-strengthening interventions, including microfinance, savings, and financial incentives, on HIV and other sexual and reproductive health outcomes in resource-poor settings. She is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded randomized controlled trial examining the pilot efficacy of a microenterprise intervention enhanced with behavioral economics principles on HIV prevention among high-risk African American young adults who are homeless, out of school, and unemployed. She also contributes to similar economic-strengthening interventions to improve health behaviors among Native American adolescents and Kenyan urban youth.Perspectives of Minority Youth with Type 1 Diabetes and Their Parents on Diabetes Care Responsibilities: Tailoring a Family Intervention to Improve Glycemic Control
Ashley Michelle Butler
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine; Clinical Child Psychologist, Texas Children’s Hospital
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Ashley Michelle Butler, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). She directs the Health Disparities Research Laboratory in Pediatric Psychology at BCM, which focuses on community-engaged research for children at risk for poor health outcomes and inadequate healthcare. Butler is also a Licensed Clinical Child Psychologist at Texas Children’s Hospital with expertise in ADHD and Disruptive Behavior and pediatric diabetes. Her work focuses on racial/ethnic differences in healthcare and health outcomes of children’s mental health, childhood obesity, and pediatric diabetes, as well as effective behavioral and psychosocial interventions. Butler is an NIH Scholar under an NIDDK K-12 career development award that provides mentoring for behavioral scientists in pediatric type 1 diabetes research. She is the PrincipaI Investigator (PI) of an NIDDK DP3 research grant to develop and pilot test a community-based behavioral intervention to improve glycemic control among African American and Latino school-aged children with type 1 diabetes. Finally, she is the PI of an institutional research award to pilot test a peer-delivered intervention for parents to prevent obesity among African American and Latino preschoolers. Butler is a member and the current chair of the Committee on Children, Youth, and Families of the American Psychological Association.
3 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH: DISCUSSANT
Carolyn Tucker Halpern
Professor and Chair, Maternal and Child Health, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Carolyn Tucker Halpern, PhD, is Professor and Chair, Department of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). She is a developmental psychologist and Deputy Director/co-investigator of the Waves IV and V National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) program projects. Before her work on the Add Health project, Halpern directed two US-based longitudinal studies examining pubertal changes and their implications for adolescent sexual and psychosocial development, as well as a global longitudinal data collection project assessing the potential of the web for improving adolescents’ knowledge about sexual and reproductive health. Halpern’s research aims to improve the understanding of healthy sexual development and the implications of adolescent experiences for developmental and demographic processes into adulthood. Her current work uses Add Health data to examine sexual trajectories from adolescence into adulthood, and the implications of those patterns for multiple aspects of adult well-being. Health and health disparities of sexual and gender minorities comprise a growing component of her work. Halpern has received funding from NICHD and NIDA to support her research, and has collaborated with investigators within and external to UNC-CH to evaluate longitudinal interventions to reduce HIV risk in adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. She is the author or coauthor of more than 140 journal articles and chapters on these topics.
3:30 p.m. – 4 p.m.
SYNTHESIS OF THE DAY: QUESTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Chair and Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health