Scholars
STUDENTS AND FACULTY LEADING THE WAY
Assessing the State of Public Health The American Rescue Plan included $7.7 billion for 100,000 new public health jobs, and much of the money went to individual states. To learn how the funds were being used and what progress was made, Michael S. Sparer, JD, PhD, professor and chair of Health Policy and Management, and Lawrence D. Brown, PhD, professor of Health Policy and Management, spoke with leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and traveled to Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, New York, and Washington. They published their findings in The Milbank Quarterly: States were not spending the money expeditiously. There are limits to what funding can do without cooperation from local governments. (Kentucky was the only state where there was a “truly collaborative process” between local and state officials.) Public health needs support from mayors, and local commissioners, and these leaders need to be persuaded that improving the public health system will benefit citizens.
Student Startup Ideas What’s your elevator pitch? How will your startup be both a financial success and a boon to public health? This was the assignment of Fast Pitch, a Columbia Mailman School-hosted competition open to budding student entrepreneurs across the university. Organized by the Department of Health Policy and Management, the most recent competition saw 10 teams face off for the $5,000 Asha Saxena Prize for Entrepreneurship. Each team was allotted seven minutes to explain their startup’s value proposition and walk judges through the steps necessary to bring it to fruition. The winner was Chris Chin, an Executive MPH student at Columbia Mailman School. His nonprofit, Crosstalk Connections, seeks to ease the burden of support phone calls that are a core part of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous by automatically connecting someone in recovery with a supportive member of their recovery team. Photographs: (left) courtesy of subjects; (above) Anne Foulke Toner; (right) iStock
A Major Grant for a Significant Problem Daniel Giovenco, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences, was awarded a five-year, $2.9 million National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01). His research will explore the impact of local interventions to establish caps on the number of tobacco retail licenses permitted in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City. Tobacco retailer density is disproportionately high in lowincome communities and certain racial and ethnic enclaves, contributing to severe socioeconomic and social disparities in smoking and its resultant health harms. His results will inform equitable policy formation and help to reduce persistent health disparities.
Faculty Book ..... The Social Epidemiology of the COVID-19 Pandemic Dustin Duncan, ScD, associate professor of Epidemiology, Stephen S. Morse, PhD, professor of Epidemiology, and Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi, MB, ChB, PhD, are coeditors of The Social Epidemiology of the COVID-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press). The book covers topics such as racism and stigmatization of COVID-19; gender and sexuality as they relate to COVID-19; disability and ableism during the pandemic; and the links between neighborhoods, neighborhood factors, and COVID-19 outcomes.
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