Member of the Month: Sandro Galea

Muntasir Masum Muntasir Masum is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Department of Demography (expected Spring 2021). Before starting his Ph.D. journey, he was working as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned his master’s degree from the Department of Sociology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research broadly focuses on the determinants of health and mortality, and the impact of health and public policies on different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and residence area groups in the United States and elsewhere. One of his current research projects examines how alcohol consumption behavior affects all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Selena Ortiz Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Administration & Demography at The Pennsylvania State University. She earned a BA in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, an MPH in health policy from the University of Arizona, and her PhD in health policy and health services from UCLA. Prior to her appointment at Penn State in 2015, Selena was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (Cohort 11) at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and a non-resident fellow at the ASH Center for Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her mixed-methods research focuses on the social determinants of health, health disparities, and processes related to health policy formation, implementation, and evaluation.

Tia Palermo Tia Palermo, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Her research examines the effects of social policy on population health. She was formerly a researcher at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti in Florence, Italy, where was actively engaged in facilitating evidence uptake in government decision-making. Previously, she also worked for Ipas. Tia holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an affiliate of the Transfer Project and a Faculty Fellow at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Global Health Equity, where she co-leads the Global Child Big Ideas Team.