Public Health Ground Rounds

01/20/2023
“Global Health as a Field of Power Relations: Implementation Research and Decolonization”
Rebecka Lundgren, PhD, MPH
11 am – 12 pm PST

Rebecka Lundgren, MPH, PhD, is an associate professor of medicine in the Center on Gender Equity and Health, Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health at UC San Diego. She is an applied anthropologist with 30 years of experience in implementation science, and expertise in family planning, adolescence, social norms and gender-based violence. She applies her expertise to bridge the gap between science and effective policy and practice through research, technical assistance and catalytic support to scale sexual and reproductive health interventions. Dr. Lundgren leads implementation research teams of UC San Diego faculty, staff and students alongside global partners to identify and scale promising health programs, including USAID and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded projects such as Growing up GREAT in Kinshasa, REAL Fathers in Uganda and the five-year, global Agency for All project which seeks to develop local conceptualizations and measures of agency, increase understanding of how to increase agency through social and behavior change initiatives and build evidence on the relationship between agency and health outcomes.

01/25/2023
“Minimum Wages and Maternal Health in the U.S. : A Quasi-Experimental Analysis”
Mark McGovern, PhD, MA
1 – 2 pm PST

Dr. Mark McGovern is an assistant professor in the department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health in New Jersey. Prior to joining Rutgers, Dr. McGovern was an assistant professor at Queen's University Belfast, and a fellow on the Global Demography of Aging Program at Harvard University. As a health economist and health policy researcher, his main research interest is on evaluating the long run impact of programs aimed at improving early life conditions and inequality at birth. His other research interests include quasi-experimental analysis and quantitative methods for missing data, particularly their application to policy-relevant questions, and the social effects of physical and mental health conditions.

01/27/2023
“Medicare Advantage Plan Choice among Older Adults Living with Dementia”
Lianlian Lei,  PhD, MA
11 – 1 pm PST

Dr. Lianlian Lei is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan. She completed her PhD in health services research and policy in the department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester in May 2020. Her research interests include aging, dementia care, caregivers, and health insurance. For her K99/R00 career development award, she aims to identify the causal impact of informal caregiving on health care use of both older adults living with dementia and their caregivers and the reciprocal impacts of serious illness between older adults within dementia-caregiver dyads.

Winter Symposium

01/23/2023
Emerging Infectious Diseases: Are We Prepared
 1 - 4 pm PST

The winter symposium will address strategies used to control emerging infectious diseases, including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and future approaches to novel viral outbreaks. Jointly hosted by UC San Diego’s PREPARE Institute, the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, Collaborative to Halt Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes (CHARM), and the Resilient Center, this event will bring together experts and the public to explore the nature of emerging infectious diseases and discuss ways to collectively prepare. 

Scheduled events include a keynote address by Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director under former President Barack Obama; a pandemic tabletop exercise led by Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, MD, PhD, Resilient Center principal investigator; and a leadership panel with Dean Cheryl Anderson, PhD, MPH, Christopher Longhurst, MD, UC San Diego Health chief medical officer and chief digital officer, Davey Smith, MD, PREPARE Institute director, and Victor Nizet, MD, CHARM faculty lead.

Register online.

10/21/2022
“Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia: Can a Broader Set of Research Methods Accelerate Progress?”
Maria Glymour, ScD, SM
11 am – 12 pm PST

Maria Glymour, ScD, SM, is a professor in the department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. She is also the vice chair of finance for the department and faculty lead for the Lifecourse Epidemiology Division. Dr. Glymour's research is at the intersection of Alzheimer's disease/cognitive aging, social determinants of health, and causal inference in social epidemiology. During her training, Dr. Glymour completed an bachelor of arts in biology at the University of Chicago, a master of science at the Harvard School of Public Health, a doctor of science at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University. Dr. Glymour spends most of her time, when not attending urgent zoom meetings, puzzling about how we can use the inadequate samples, muddled study designs, and incomplete measurements available to us to learn more about reducing social inequities in cognitive aging and dementia. 

09/02/2022
“Big Data, Missing Data and Transportation”
Thomas A. Louis, PhD

Thomas A. Louis (PhD in Mathematical Statistics, Columbia University; BA in Mathematics, Dartmouth College) is Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. From 2018–2020, he served as an Expert Statistical Consultant to the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA; from 2013-2015 served as Associate Director for Research & Methodology and Chief Scientist at the Census Bureau. His research includes Bayesian methods, clinical and field studies, health services research, genomics and survey methods. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; a National Associate of the National Research Council; is an Honorary Life Member of the International Biometric Society and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium.

Current service includes Associate Editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and its Application; member of the National Academies’ panel evaluating the 2020 census. Former service includes a variety of National Academy panels, the NIH/NIEHS Board of Scientific Counselors, coordinating editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, co-editor of Biometrics and president of the International Biometric Society.

07/15/2022
“COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study of the Mind: Topline Results of a Large National Pragmatic Clinical Trial”
Laura D. Baker, PhD

Laura D. Baker is Professor of Internal Medicine, Neurology, and Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and Associate Director of the NIA-supported Wake Forest Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is an international leader in the areas of cognitive aging and lifestyle interventions to protect brain health and prevent cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Dr. Baker has been an investigator of over 55 clinical studies on aging and Alzheimer’s disease prevention and treatment. Currently, she is one of the Principal Investigators of the large multi-site study supported by the Alzheimer’s Association that is testing whether healthy changes in lifestyle can protect cognitive function in older Americans who are at increased risk for memory decline. This study is part of a global network of other similar lifestyle intervention studies now conducted in over 35 countries worldwide.

For the last 8 years, Dr. Baker partnered with the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study to lead a multisite study in adults with mild cognitive impairment to test whether exercise might be ‘medicine’ to slow cognitive decline. Dr. Baker has just completed a national pragmatic 3-year trial testing that examined whether daily supplementation with cocoa extract or a multivitamin could improve cognition in older women and men. The topline results of this study will be presented at USC’s Public Health Grand Rounds.

06/17/2022
“Global Digital Health - Moving from Shiny Objects to National Health Systems Strengthening”
Alain B. Labrique, PhD, MHS, MS

Alain Labrique is the founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative; an infectious disease and population epidemiologist, he serves as Professor and the inaugural Associate Chair for Research in Department of International Health. Labrique leads research in maternal, neonatal and infant health in resource-limited settings and was recognized as one of the Top 11 mHealth Innovators in 2011. He served as a lead author on the 2012 Bellagio Declaration on mHealth Evidence. In 2018, he was awarded the Excellence in International Public Health Practice Award and a Distinguished Alumnus award from Johns Hopkins University. Labrique has authored over 150 publications in high-impact journals, as well as many book chapters and technical reports. His frameworks for Digital Health remains among the most cited. Prof. Labrique serves as a Technical Advisor to several international and global health agencies and Ministries of Health and is the Chair of the WHO Digital Health Guidelines Development Group and a member of the WHO Digital Health Roster of Experts.

05/20/2022
“Role of Neuromuscular Function in Fall Injuries and Fracture”
Elsa S. Strotmeyer, PhD, MPH

Dr. Strotmeyer is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and the Director of the NIH NIA T32 Epidemiology of Aging Training Grant at the University of Pittsburgh, where she completed her MPH (1997), PhD in Epidemiology (2000), and a subsequent NIA T32 Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2001-2003). She is an expert in the area of the epidemiology of aging with research that focuses on metabolic risk factors and diabetes-related conditions in aging associated with neuromuscular and musculoskeletal declines in the etiology and outcomes of fall injuries, mobility, disability and mortality. She has pioneered the study of complex inter-relationships of peripheral nerves, neuromuscular and musculoskeletal function in aging and diabetes. Dr. Strotmeyer is a multi-PI of an NIH NIAMS R01 to investigate detailed muscle associations with bone parameters from HRpQCT. She serves as a multi-PI of an Amgen grant to study clinical characteristics, including history of MI and stroke, among US post-menopausal women initiating treatment with osteoporosis medications. She is PI of an NIH NIA R01 examining time trends and clinical geriatric outcomes of non-fracture fall injuries (NFFI) and fractures, across 20 years of 4 pooled longitudinal cohorts linked to Medicare claims in nearly 12,000 older women and men. Dr. Strotmeyer has been awarded several prestigious honors including an invited lectureship, the Health Sciences Research Award from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), a past elected Chair of the GSA Health Sciences Section, and Fellowship in both the GSA and American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR).

04/22/2022
“Solving Hunger Without Food and Other Healing-Centered Approaches for Public Health”
Mariana Chilton, PhD, MPH

Mariana Chilton, PhD, MPH, is a Professor of Health Management and Policy, at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She founded the Center for Hunger-Free Communities. Dr. Chilton founded Witnesses to Hunger, a movement to increase women's participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty. She is Principal Investigator of the Building Wealth and Health Network, designed to incentivize entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. For 15 years she was a Co-PI in the Children’s HealthWatch. Her research addresses trauma, food insecurity and the advancement of human rights. She served as the Co-Chair of the Bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger, meant to advise Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture on how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine.

03/18/2022
“Discrimination, Violence and Mental Health in California under the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Findings from the CalVEX Study in March 2020 and March 2021”
Anita Raj, PhD, MS

Anita Raj is a Tata Chancellor Professor of Society and Health. She is a Professor in both the Departments of Medicine and Education Studies and the Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH). Her research, including both epidemiologic and intervention studies, focuses on sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, women’s economic empowerment, and gender inequalities including gender-based violence and child, early and forced marriage.

Dr. Raj has approximately 300 peer-reviewed publications, and her work has been featured in major media outlets in the US, the UK, and in India. She created and leads the EMERGE platform, which provides open access to evidence-based measures on gender equality and empowerment (GEE), builds national indicators on GEE in global survey research partners for tracking SDG5, and provides trainings and technical assistance for researchers and implementers on measurement science and empowerment. She also created and leads the CalVEX study which involves state-wide survey research and supportive qualitative data on violence and health in California. She has served as an advisor to UN Women, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly on the issue of child marriage. She also serves as advisor and grantee to Blue Shield of California Foundation and Kaiser Permanente on issues of social and health policies for California based on the work of CalVEX.

In 2019, she helped spearhead two groundbreaking journal special issues on Gender Equality and Health for the Lancet and for Social Science and Medicine- Population Health. This work was conducted as part of the Center on Gender Equity and Health’s advancements in gender data science research and in preparation for Beijing Plus 25, a global initiative with the UN to improve gender equality and empowerment globally.” Since 2020, she has been leading research and measurement in the area of COVID-19 and gender and secondary impacts of the pandemic on women and socially marginalized groups in the US and globally.

02/11/2022
“Using Genomic Epidemiology to Map the Early Community Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara County”
Elsa Villarino, MD, MPH

Dr. Elsa Villarino is a Medical Epidemiologist Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) alumni and CDC Preventive Medicine Residency/SDSU MPH Graduate (1986-1991). Her 31-year career at the CDC included serving until 2013 as the Director of the CDC Tuberculosis Trials Consortium (TBTC) based in Atlanta GA. The TBTC is a global trials network that conducts GCP Phase II-IV studies for new anti-TB drugs. From 2013 to 2019, Dr. Villarino was the Director of the CDC Mexico Office and the Public Health Attaché (HHS) detailed to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico, working in collaboration with the Mexican Minister of Health, the directors of Epidemiology, Disease Preventive and Control, Laboratory Diagnosis and Reference, and other leaders of US and Mexico government organizations, universities, and NGOs. 

After the completion of her CDC’s international assignment, Dr. Villarino retired from the Federal Public Health arena. In 2019 she moved to California and worked two years as an Assistant Public Health Officer, Tuberculosis Controller, and Director, Special investigations Branch for Long Term Care Facilities and Acute Care Hospitals, COVID-19 Response, for Santa Clara County Public Health Department. Her responsibilities included analyzing information to establish priority programs for TB and COVID-19 control, to measure the progress achieved, and to analyze with statistics epidemiologic, laboratory and genomics data. 

Presently, Dr. Villarino is part of the Investigations and Response team, California Department of Public Health (CDPH) HealthCare Associated Infections (HAI) Program. She is an expert consultant for prevention, investigation and response to HAI and antimicrobial resistance (AR) outbreaks and unusual occurrences, including COVID-19. She works with HAI Program partners and stakeholders, including other programs in the Center for Health Care Quality (e.g., Licensing and Certification), the HAI Advisory Committee, the Division of Communicable Disease Control, and other programs in the Center for Infectious Diseases of the Department of Public Health. 

01/21/2022
“The challenge of conducting epidemiological research in times of pandemic and scientific denialism”
Pedro C. Hallal, PhD

Dr. Pedro C. Hallal is an Epidemiologist from the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil. His primary field of research is physical activity and health, in which he has an impressive track record, including the leadership of the Lancet Physical Activity Series published in 2012, 2016 and 2021. More recently, Dr. Hallal served as the Principal Investigator for the EPICOVID19 project, the largest epidemiological study on COVID-19 in Brazil. Dr. Hallal has been funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society in UK, and is now based at UC San Diego in San Diego, CA, through a Fulbright Chair in Public Health appointment.

04/05/2021

"The Roots of Anti-Asian Racism and Violence"
Simeon Man, PhD 

Dr. Simeon Man, Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies Program at UC San Diego will speak on “The Roots of Anti-Asian Racism and Violence” followed by discussions on actionable steps to combat racism, including on our campus. This session will be student-centered, and all members of the School are invited.  

03/25/2021

“Combating Anti-API Hate: From Past to Present”
Kent Lee, Executive Director of Pacific Arts Movement and Co-Chair of the San Diego Asian Pacific Islander Coalition

Kent Lee is the Executive Director of Pacific Arts Movement (Pac Arts), one of the largest media arts organizations in North America focusing on Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander cinema and is best known for presenting the annual San Diego Asian Film Festival.  With over 14 years of non-profit experience, Kent also volunteers in various non-profit organizations and community groups for his neighborhood, alma mater and other causes. These include: the San Diego API Coalition (Co-Chair), UCSD API Alumni Council (Incoming Chair), Asian Business Association of San Diego (Treasurer), Alpha Phi Omega (Treasurer, National Board Member), UC San Diego's Chancellor's Community Advisory Board, International Deaf Education Advocacy & Leadership, and the Mira Mesa Community Planning Group. Kent has been recognized for his leadership and service in the community with UC San Diego’s 40 Under 40 Alumni Award as well as SD Metro’s 40 Under 40 Award. Kent is a proud alumnus of the University of California, San Diego, where he received degrees in Economics and General Biology. Kent and his wife Phuong have called Mira Mesa home for nearly fifteen years, where they currently reside with their two young children. 

01/26/2021
Loretta J. Ross, PhD 

Loretta J. Ross is an Associate Professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture. She has taught at Hampshire College and Arizona State University. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree awarded in 2003 from Arcadia University and a second honorary doctorate degree awarded from Smith College in 2013. She also has credits towards a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Emory University. She serves as a consultant for Smith College, collecting oral histories of feminists of color for the Sophia Smith Collection, which also contains her personal archives. Loretta’s activism began when she was tear-gassed at a demonstration as a first-year student at Howard University in 1970. As a teenager, she was involved in anti-apartheid and anti-gentrification activism in Washington, DC as a founding member of the DC Study Group. As part of a 50-year history in social justice activism until her retirement from community organizing in 2012, she was the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005-2012 and co-created the theory of Reproductive Justice in 1994.

Loretta was National Co-Director of April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., the largest protest march in U.S. history at that time with 1.15 million participants. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE) in Atlanta, Georgia from 1996-2004.  She launched the Women of Color Program for the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the 1980s and was the national program director of the National Black Women’s Health Project. Loretta was one of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center in the 1970s, launching her career by pioneering work on violence against women, as the third Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. She is a member of the Women's Media Center's Progressive Women's Voices. Watch Makers: Women Who Make America video.Loretta has co-written three books on reproductive justice: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice in 2004; Reproductive Justice: An Introduction in March 2017; and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique in October 2017. Her newest book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture is forthcoming later in 2021. Loretta is a rape survivor, forced to raise a child born of incest, and also a survivor of sterilization abuse at age 23. She is a model of how to survive and thrive despite the traumas that disproportionately affect low-income women of color.