Public Health Faces: People & Projects

Ruta Sharangpani

"I wasn't able to do procedures like stitches, that kind of stuff. But I think I found acceptance with my patients, partly because I was very honest about my disability. I wouldn't say it helped me, but in some cases it gave me an inroad to create some sort of rapport—sometimes when I didn't have any other way. There are a lot of things in medicine that can't be done with vision," says Ruta Sharangpani, who is legally blind. Before entering SPH's Preventive Medicine Residency, she completed medical school and did a residency in internal medicine. Learn more about her.

"Finding ways to strengthen bonds between non-resident African-American fathers and their sons may be a critical strategy for preventing youth problem behavior," says Cleo Caldwell. African-American boys disproportionately grow up in single parent households, often without meaningful relationships with their biological fathers. She is working in partnership with the Flint community to positively affect the relationship between preadolescent African American male children living apart from their biological fathers through structured intervention activities designed to prevent adolescent substance use, violent behavior, and early sexual initiation. Read about the Fathers & Sons project.

Davyda Hammond

"Southwest Detroit, predominantly Latino, has historically contained most of the city's industrial facilities," says Davyda Hammond, an engineer. As a W.K. Kellogg Community Health Scholars Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SPH, mentored by SPH's Edith Parker and Timothy Dvonch, she analyzed contaminants in this neighborhood and in predominantly African-American East Detroit and their affect on asthmatic children. Her work will help advocacy for environmental policy change.
Read more about Davyda Hammond's research. (PDF)

Marianne Udow

"People who go into public health have aspirations to change the world for the better, and graduates from this school have been doing that for decades," says SPH alum Marianne Udow. Director of Michigan's Department of Human Services until summer 2007. Udow has taken a new position at the helm of Michigan's Center for Healthcare Quality & Transformation. In that role, she plans to "improve the delivery of services, and get the right care to the right person at the right time."
Read her remarks to students of SPH's 2007 graduating class. (PDF)

Rich Lichtenstein

"Increasing classroom diversity produces an entire cohort of better trained health professionals," insists Rich Lichtenstein. He says a diverse classroom makes everyone present "more culturally competent and more adaptable." For launching generations of enlightened SPH grads, he received the 2006 Excellence in Teaching Award, presented by Khalifa Al-Khalifa.
Read "Promoting Diversity in Health Management: The University of Michigan Experience," (PDF) which Rich Lichtenstein wrote for the summer 2005 Journal of Health Administration Education.

Susan Murray

"My work has helped make selection of recipients for lung transplants more equitable," says Susan Murray (pictured here with her twin sons). She's an associate professor of Biostatistics who, together with colleagues, came up with statistical methodology to help get donor lungs to patients with high urgency and high potential for gain. The model has influenced policy nationwide.

Erin and Ellen Griffiths

"The students, speakers, faculty, and staff left me feeling very proud to be associated with Michigan and the field of public health," said Maryland-based nutritionist and SPH alumna Ellen Griffiths (right) about the 21st annual Minority Health Conference. Her daughter Erin (left), a third-generation Michigan graduate student, was co-chair of the March 2007 conference on "Health, Race, and Media: The Power of Perception."
Watch video of the conference keynote addresses.

Toby Citrin

"Media distorts the science," says Toby Citrin, co-director of Michigan Center for Public Health & Community Genomics. It's too early for anyone to be proclaiming genetic causes for most chronic diseases that disproportionately affect minorities, he says. But media does it regularly, in the absence of data to clearly identify causes. Really, it's all about the social construct—and interactions across the lifecourse.
Learn more about community genomics.

Derek Griffith

"Health systems set up during Jim Crow (legal segregation) weren't designed to treat people equally," says SPH assistant professor Derek Griffith. He wants to move race and racism from the margins of the discussion about health disparities to the center. His American Cancer Society Mentored Research Scholar grant is designed to develop a culturally sensitive intervention to improve urban African-American men’s diet and physical activity and lower their risk of certain cancers by adapting elements of the church-based Body and Soul intervention for use in men's organizations.
More about Derek Griffith.
Learn more about the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health, where Derek Griffith is the assistant director, and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan, where he is the associate director of evaluation.

Mark Padilla

"The expanding global tourism industry is changing lives—and health," says SPH assistant professor Mark Padilla. He uses medical anthropological techniques to understand how the changes brought about by the Caribbean tourism industry are related to the risk for HIV infection among disadvantaged populations.
Press release on Mark Padilla's work.

Ana Diez Roux

"Our new project will examine how social and biologic factors interact to create race differences in cardiovascular disease and other health outcomes," says SPH's Ana Diez Roux. She and her team use several large cohort studies to investigate the role of neighborhood environments in generating inequalities in cardiovascular disease and its risk factors by socioeconomic characteristics and race/ethnicity. She also studies the role of stress and acculturation in health disparities and social inequalities in health, and is the director of the new Michigan Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities.
Browse Ana Diez Roux's projects through the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health.

Rachel Snow

"AIDS exposes the weak spots. Because it's tied up with the sexual transmission of infection, it tells you a lot about social power," says UM SPH's Rachel Snow. Her research focuses on the measure of gender and its relation to health in diverse settings, as well as the effective integration of HIV interventions (clinical and social) into reproductive health systems. She has conducted clinical and epidemiologic research on contraception, reproductive morbidity, and gender in a wide range of countries, including China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Mexico. She is currently conducting research on the operational and policy challenges of integrating HIV/AIDS into reproductive health programs in Burkina Faso and South Africa, and the social impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Read the SPH spring 2006 Findings magazine article on her work in Africa.

Heidi Durbeck & Sarah Segerlind

"Farmworkers serving as community health workers promote health and social justice," says Heidi Durbeck, left, SPH alum and former capacity-building director for the nonprofit agency Migrant Health Promotion. SPH student Sarah Segerlind (HBHE '08, at right) helped develop strategies for emergency and disaster preparedness in farmworker communities in a summer 2007 internship sponsored by the Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness at UM SPH.
Learn more about Migrant Health Promotion.