IAPHS Welcomes New Leadership

IAPHS is pleased to welcome newly elected board members, Roland Thorpe, Taylor Hargrove, Anna Zajacova, and Katherine Theall. Their collective experience and expertise in the fields of population health will be a valuable asset to furthering the role of IAPHS in the scientific community. While welcoming the new board members, IAPHS thanks the departing board members for their guidance during the past year.

We take this opportunity to briefly introduce our new board members here.

President-Elect: Roland J. Thorpe Jr is a Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Thorpe brings a wealth of experience and insights gained from his additional affiliation with School of Medicine, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Hopkins Population Center, JH Center for Health Disparities Solutions, JH Center on Aging and Health, as well as from his strong publication record that contributed to the understanding of how race, SES, and segregation influence the health and well-being of African Americans. He is a co-leader in the Leadership and Education in Academic Research and Networking for Enhancing Diversity (LEARNED) initiative that is dedicated to supporting the professional development of PhD students by providing participants with critical resources for ensuring both academic and professional success.

Board Member – Junior: Taylor Hargrove is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). She is also affiliated with the Carolina Population Center. Dr. Hargrove’s research strives to uncover and explain the development of health disparities across the life course, focusing on the consequences of race, skin color, gender, and socioeconomic status. Her work addresses both between-group inequalities in health as well as sources of heterogeneity within groups that differentiate pathways to health. In a recent project, she explores the biological and social mechanisms that may diminish the health benefits of socioeconomic resources for particular social groups in the US. She plans to continue this line of research to help elucidate the pathways through which social factors “get under our skin” to shape health and undergird social stratification.

Board Member – Mid Career: Anna Zajacova is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Zajacova studies social determinants of population health across the life course, and her signature work is explaining the education gap in mortality among U.S. white women. Her research aims to understand how and why educational attainment is related to health. She also pursues other areas of inquiry, such as how the sociopolitical contexts of US states influence health and health disparities in their populations, and how disability among American adults changed in recent years and what caused the changes. She recently joined other experts from 32 partner institutions on The Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making (CAnD3): Developing Talent for Population Analytics in Aging Societies where young researchers across Canada will be encouraged to develop data skills to fully analyze, assess, and address the spectrum of policy and ethical implications of an aging population.

Board Member – Senior: Katherine Theall is the Cecile Usdin Professor of Women’s Health and Director of the Tulane Mary Amelia Women’s Center at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. As a social epidemiologist, Dr. Theall’s research focuses on reducing health inequities by understanding and altering built and social neighborhood environments and social policies for better health in vulnerable populations locally, nationally, and internationally and researching innovative methodologies to do so. As director of an academic center with a strong base in community partnered participatory research aimed at addressing social determinants of women and children’s health and the processes that shape these determinants, she continues to find ways to disseminate her team’s work and turn it into action.

Thank you to all of our new board members for their willingness to serve our IAPHS community so generously.