About Us

Established in 1997, the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health (CSEPH) is an inter- and multidisciplinary effort devoted to understanding how factors at different levels (ranging from social policies to genes) and over the lifespan affect health and health inequalities.

CSEPH-affiliated faculty come from many disciplines, including epidemiology, medicine, nutrition, genetics, biostatistics, sociology, anthropology, environmental health, public policy, history, demography, and ecology.

Ongoing work led by CSEPH faculty focuses on a broad range of areas related to the social determinants of population health including neighborhood health effects, lifecourse influences on health, social factors and infection, interactions between social and physical environments, biological mediators of social differences in health, gene-environment interactions and epigenetics, and the application of systems approaches in population health.

The CSEPH is also home to training programs and related centers, including the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar’s Program, a prestigious interdisciplinary training program in population health, and the Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities (CIAHD) which focuses on investigating how social and biologic factors interact to shape race/ethnic differences in cardiovascular risk. Our faculty collaborate with many institutions in the US and internationally.

Located on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, CSEPH is housed in the School of Public Health, in its newly built Crossroads and Tower facility. CSEPH has approximately 7,200 square feet of space, two conference rooms, and a large-scale mailing, printing, and copying space. It provides office space for over 26 students and fellows in addition to research staff and faculty. It also includes several common meeting spaces and offers easy access to a range of University resources on campus.