Monthly Archives: June 2019

David H Rehkopf is an Associate Professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine at Stanford University. He joined IAPHS in 2016. Follow David on twitter: @drehkopf

Tell us a little about yourself, where are you from, where did you go to graduate school, what makes you jump out of bed each morning?

Most days helping to make breakfast for my kids and get them out the door to school gets me out of bed in the morning, but on the best days it is meeting a friend for a run or a ride before the kids wake up.

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

I try to fill the space between doing basic social science research and applied work in program evaluation and public policy research. My research products may not always provide an immediate answer of what to do, but I want them to give us ideas on new directions we should head in to improve health, to be followed up by evaluations of what actual works. It is critical to evaluate the impact of what we have done, but we also don’t want to only look at what we have done in the past.

What disciplines do you engage with and are there disciplines that you would like to engage with?

Economics and sociology, now also with molecular biology. I looked over a list of academic disciplines and it was a challenge to find ones that wouldn’t have some positive impact on my work. But for the time being I am not engaging with Astrophysics, although perhaps they would have suggestions about some unmeasured priors for my DAGs.

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