PAST SCHOLARS

RWJ HSSP Scholars 2005-2007

John A. Cowan, Jr. - John is completing a Neurosurgery residency at the University of Michigan. He received undergraduate training at Davidson College in physics and earned a MD from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He co-founded the Surgical Outcomes Research Team (SORT) at the University of Michigan which has published extensively on disparities in outcome after complex surgical procedures. His current research focuses on changes in utilization in surgical technology throughout the United States. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, he will investigate the interplay between socioeconomic status, access to surgical technology, and functional outcomes after complex surgery. John is Chief Resident of Neurosurgery at the University of Michigan.

Craig A. Hadley - Craig's research interests include biological and nutritional anthropology; specifically, the causes and consequences of household food insecurity, the causes and consequences of current variation in young child feeding practices, and biosocial approaches to understanding the causes of health inequalities, with an emphasis on young children and adolescents. He is currently working on a community based study investigating the long term consequences of seasonal food insecurity in rural Tanzania, a population-based survey examining health and well-being of adolescents in western Ethiopia, and a community-based, mixed methods study of health and well-being among African refugees resettled in the USA. He received his PhD from the University of California at Davis where he was in the Anthropology and International Nutrition programs. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropological Demography at Brown University's Population Studies and Training Center. Craig is an Assistant Professor at Emory University.

Theresa L. Osypuk - Theresa is a social epidemiologist researching racial health disparities and their geographic patterns across the United States. She is particularly interested in the effect of neighborhood and metropolitan level opportunity structures for socioeconomic advancement and wealth accumulation, which place different racial groups on different health trajectories across the life course. Her work also examines how social policies may mitigate racial inequality, particularly related to home mortgage financing and housing mobility. Theresa has coauthored publications for the American Journal of Public Health, Housing Policy Debate, and Social Science and Medicine, exploring how racial residential segregation and housing mobility policy influence health. To stimulate translation of research into policy, she and her colleagues have developed a data-driven indicator website that highlights racial inequality in social, economic, political, and health domains across the 331 US metropolitan areas. Theresa additionally conducts research in tobacco control, by examining racial/ethnic and socioeconomic patterns of smoking across the US, and the effect of clean indoor air policies. Theresa received her doctorate from Harvard University in 2005. She received her Masters of Science at Harvard in 2002. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked with The Advertising Council, developing national social marketing campaigns to raise public awareness via mass media for such issues as housing discrimination, violence prevention, and youth fitness. Theresa is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University.

Sacoby M. Wilson - Sacoby Wilson is an environmental health scientist whose research foci include the intersection of environmental and social determinants of health and health disparities, the spatiotemporal distribution of environmental phenomena and potential environmental public health consequences, GIS-based exposure assessment, the impact of the built environment on vulnerable populations, and community-driven environmental justice science and research. Wilson earned a MS (2000) and PhD (2005) in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-School of Public Health. He has published his work on industrial hog operations and environmental justice in Environmental Health Perspectives and presented several papers at the annual American Public Health Association Conference. Wilson is a member of the Environment Section of the American Public Health Association, Society for Risk Analysis, Association of American Geographers, Air & Waste Management Association and SSSP. He is a former EPA STAR and GRO (MAI) Fellow and is currently a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program (ELP). Sacoby received a BS degree in Biology/Ecotoxicology from Alabama A&M University in 1998. Sacoby is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of South Carolina.

RWJ HSSP Past Scholars 2004-2006

Jennie Brand - Jennie completed an MS and a PhD in Sociology at the University of University of Wisconsin. Her research is broadly focused on socioeconomic inequality and its implications for various outcomes that indicate life chances. She is particularly interested in the impact of significant life events, such as job loss, on subsequent socioeconomic and health trajectories; this substantive focus has accompanied a methodological focus in the potential outcome approach to causal inference. Her doctoral dissertation examined the long-term effects of job displacement on career outcomes using several estimators of causal effects, including conditional difference-in-differences matching estimation. She has also assessed how physical and cognitive job characteristics, and job control, mediate relationships between socioeconomic status and a variety of physical and mental health outcomes. Jennie is currently investigating the relationship between job security and health, examining selection and causation effects, and the mechanisms that mediate the relationship between job loss and health. She is also working on a methodological paper involving a potential outcome approach for longitudinal situations in which both exposure to treatment and the effects of treatment are time-varying. Jennie is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Marie S. O'Neill - Marie earned a BA at Brown University, an MS in Environmental Health Sciences from Harvard University, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Pan American Health Organization, in Mexico at the National Institute of Public Health and the National Center for Environmental Health as a Fulbright Scholar, and as a Research Fellow in Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research interests include health effects of air pollution and temperature extremes (mortality, asthma, hospital admissions, and cardiovascular endpoints); environmental exposure assessment; and socio-economic influences on health. Marie is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

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RWJ HSSP Past Scholars 2003-2005

Hear what our Past Scholars have to say about the Program here at Michigan!

Allison's UM Experience Video

Sarah's UM Experience Video

Nick's UM Experience Video

Allison E. Aiello - Allison received her PhD in Epidemiology from Columbia University-Mailman School of Public Health where she held a training fellowship from the Center for Infectious Disease and Epidemiological Research. Her dissertation research focused on the community setting, where she examined whether there is a risk of increasing antibiotic resistance associated with the use of antibacterial hygiene products within the home environment. Before entering her PhD, Allison was an Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She received her MS in Environmental Health Sciences and Engineering from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill-School of Public Health. Allison's research seeks to characterize infectious agents and corresponding immune markers as a potential link between population-level social determinants and individual-level disease determinants. One of her research objectives is to determine how factors such as household and neighborhood socioeconomic position (SEP) correlate with cell-mediated immune response (as measured by herpesvirus antibody levels) among elderly Hispanics. A second research objective is to assess whether latent infections influence cognitive impairment and dementia. She is also involved in a project that aims to examine: 1) the relationship between lifecourse SEP trajectories and infectious diseases as an adult, and 2) whether latent infections are on the pathway to cardiovascular disease. Last, Allison is interested in multidisciplinary approaches for preventing antibiotic-resistance and infectious diseases within the clinical and community setting among minority populations. Allison is now an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

Sarah A. Burgard - Sarah's work focuses on the way systems of stratification and inequality impact peoples' lives. In her graduate work in sociology at UCLA, she began with studies of educational and occupational attainment during periods of change in race-related legislation in the US and South Africa, before turning to work on health disparities. Her dissertation looks at maternal and child health in South Africa and Brazil, two multiracial societies with among the highest levels of inequality in the world. She has also studied maternal and child health in Brazil at the Rand Corporation for the past several years, where she was a contract research staff member. Concurrently with the sociology work, she has pursued an MS degree in epidemiology at UCLA, and has collaborated on projects that examine race and sexual orientation-related disparities in mental health outcomes in the US. Her current research focuses on working lives and cardiovascular risk in the US, in collaboration with members of the Mac Arthur Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. Sarah's specific research involves: socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health; child morbidity; body composition and mortality in developing societies; women's use of maternal and child health care and family planning in developing societies; and the effects of occupational careers on the health of men and women in the US. Sarah is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Nick B. King - Nick holds a master's degree in medical anthropology and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University, and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His research involves: commodification and American consumer culture; exchange relations in modern medical science; and the intersection between national security and public health. Nick is now an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.

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