Member of the Month

Mustafa Hussein is an Assistant Professor in Public Health Policy & Administration at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He joined IAPHS in 2015 (and has attended all 3 annual meetings!). Learn more about Mustafa on this website: https://uwm.edu/publichealth/people/hussein-phd-mustafa/

1. 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?
I grew up in Al-Minya (a.k.a. Minia), a city of about 300,000 people on the Nile valley in Upper Egypt, 150 miles south of Cairo. I graduated from Minia University with a pharmacy degree in 2008, and started graduate school in the US shortly after, first in chemistry at Washington State, then completed a PhD in health policy at Tennessee in 2014, followed by a two-year postdoc in social epidemiology at Drexel. I find myself drawn very much to questions about social inequality in health, especially questions at the intersection of social theory, quantitative research, public policy, and moral/political philosophy.

2. How do you define yourself as a population health professional?
My work currently focuses on the role of policies, systems, and institutions as structural drivers of the levels and social distribution of health in the population. My collaborators and I examine these phenomena in various populations, including at the urban, national, and cross-national levels.

3. What disciplines do you engage with and are there disciplines that you would like to engage with?
I was trained in health policy, health economics, applied statistics/econometrics, and social epidemiology. I have also enjoyed learning and drawing insights from sociology and political science. I hope to engage more closely with political sociology and complex systems methods in the near future.

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Kasim Ortiz is a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, in their Department of Sociology & Criminology. He joined IAPHS in 2016 and attended his first IAPHS conference in October 2018. He is being trained as a medical sociologist, and has a background in urban planning and public health.

1. 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?

I was born in Brooklyn, New York but my family moved to Brunswick, Georgia when I was seven years old. I currently am a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico in their Sociology Department. This probably sounds really dorky, but I get excited about reading and learning every day. I’ve come to really enjoy research as its been a way for me to learn so much about the communities from which I come from, while simultaneously identifying ways to improve those communities!

2. How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

I define myself as a population health scientist, who applies medical sociological and social demographic techniques to identify, document, and hopefully provide possible solutions for those holding multiply stigmatized identities. Interestingly, writing this it sounds like so much more of a challenge, but one I’m up for.

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

I engage a variety of academic disciplines, such as urban planning, sociology, demography and public health. Increasingly, I am becoming much more interested in engaging history, digital humanities, and critical legal scholarship; mostly, as a result of my planned dissertation research.

4. Describe a current project/initiative that you are excited about.

Currently, two projects consume my mental energy: 1) a project assessing the impact of state-level variations in SNAP generosity in shaping racial disparities in subjective cognitive decline and 2) my dissertation project which aims to understand how residing in “gayborhoods” (as a neighborhood context) helps explain racial differences in smoking behaviors among sexual minority populations.

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Amanda M. Simanek is an Assistant Professor in the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is an Epidemiologist. She joined IAPHS in 2018. Learn more about Amanda on her website.

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?

Hello! I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, studied Women’s Studies/Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison, lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and then attended University of Michigan for my MPH in International Health Epidemiology as well as PhD in Epidemiologic Science. It requires several cups of coffee for me to do any kind of jumping in the morning!

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

I trained as a social epidemiologist in the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at University of Michigan and my research focuses broadly on identifying novel biologic pathways by which the adverse effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on health are transmitted across generations and develop across the lifecourse, with a particular emphasis on studying the role of the immune system.

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

My research integrates theoretical and methodological perspectives from epidemiology, sociology, immunology and psychology.

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Morgan Philbin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public. She joined IAPHS in 2016. Learn more about Morgan on her website and follow her on twitter: @morgan_philbin

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?

I’m from a small town in California (San Luis Obispo) that I still go back to every chance I get; there aren’t many places where you can start your day surfing and end with a hike up a mountain. I moved east for college (Wesleyan University) and graduate school (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) with some year-long detours in Tijuana, Mexico, and Beijing/Kunming, China. As for getting out of bed, I really enjoy my colleagues and being in a truly interdisciplinary department. I’ve had so many great discussions that have started with “so I have this random question…”

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

The first description that comes to mind is that I take a big qual/little quant approach to exploring how socio-structural factors impact the lives of vulnerable young people, particularly sexual and racial/ethnic minority youth. People often associate population health with giant, quantitative data sets but I’ve been working to integrate qualitative and ethnographic research into population health to try and provide a more nuanced picture of how things like state-level policies play out on the ground and impact people’s lives. This approach has also allowed me to work with individuals, and integrate theoretical approaches, from across multiple disciplines.

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Allen Mallory is a Graduate Student in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined IAPHS in 2016. Allen is currently on the student member on the IAPHS Board. Learn more about Allen on his website and follow him on twitter: @allenbmallory

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?

I grew up in Atlanta, mostly in Marietta, GA. I received my undergraduate degree in psychology from Case Western Reserve University. I have a master’s degree from Kansas State University in couple and family therapy, and currently attend the University of Texas Austin where I am in my 3rd year of the Ph.D. program in Human Development and Family Sciences.

The topic I find infinitely fascinating is human sexuality—I feel incredibly fortunate that my job is to do research and teach to promote the health and well-being of sexual and gender minority people.

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Bethany Everett is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. She joined IAPHS in 2018. Learn more about Bethany on her faculty website and follow her on twitter: @bethanygeverett

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?

I grew up in Crescent City, CA – the last (and very small) town on the California coast before you hit Oregon. It is most famous for being the site of Pelican Bay State Prison, but also where they filmed the ewok scenes in Star Wars Return of the Jedi. I received my PhD in Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 and worked as a graduate research assistant in the Institute of Behavioral Sciences at CU Boulder. Usually it is my young daughter that makes me jump out of bed each morning, but studying and fighting for reproductive and LGBT rights get me excited to come to work each day.

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

I think of myself as a Sociologist first but my work is defined by being interdisciplinary. The LGBT health field is a relatively small (but growing!) area, so a lot of my research has had to be interdisciplinary in order to collaborate with others. I was very lucky to have an NIH Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) award from 2012-2014, which exposed me to a lot of research in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Maternal-Fetal Medicine and influenced my decision more recently to focus my research on family planning and maternal and child health among sexual minority women.

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Maggie is a Research Assistant Professor (tenure track) in the Social Environment and Health Program/Survey Research Center/Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She is a Social Demographer and Epidemiologist. She joined IAPHS in 2016. Learn more about Maggie on her website or follow her on twitter @mhicken. You can also follow her lab on twitter: University of Michigan RacismLab: @RacismLab.

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?
I grew up in Nebraska, but also spent a lot of time in North Carolina before moving to Michigan for graduate school. I love being an interdisciplinary researcher, especially at UM ISR, where this type of research is really supported.

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?
I think the first word that describes me within population health boundaries is transdisciplinary. While my doctoral degree is in public health, I had the good fortune to be trained in the interdisciplinary Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. The emphasis of my training was on the science and theory, no matter the discipline – so much so that I recall not really understanding these disciplinary boundaries after graduating. Of course, I have grown to understand how research is crafted in different disciplines, but I still maintain that original transdisciplinary core, integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches from across the social and biomedical sciences along with the arts and humanities. I have found that this approach — and its potential to better clarify the social determinants of health inequities and identify intervention points — is what makes science so exciting and powerful.

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Mike is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Survey Research Center and Institute for Social Research. He is a sociologist and demographer by training. He joined IAPHS in 2016. Learn more about Mike at his website: www.mhesposito.com or follow him on twitter @mhespo.

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?
I’m from Kansas City, Missouri originally. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri and my PhD at the University of Washington. (You couldn’t pick two more disparate places.) Besides fear of unemployment, the opportunity to “solve problems” gets me out of bed in the morning. Academia, thankfully, supplies a steady-stream of difficult intellectual puzzles that are fun to solve; it keeps me going!

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?
I’m a “heavily-quantitative, race and population health scientist.” I’m a researcher first, behind university walls, but certainly hope that my work is useful for the public!

What disciplines do you engage with and are there disciplines that you would like to engage with?
The scholars that I work with most are demographers, sociologists, and epidemiologists. I’d like to engage more with folks from the humanities; the lateral-thinking and critical-skills that those disciplines stress—and that are sometimes secondary in social-science programs—would, I think, make their scholars valuable, fun collaborators.

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