Who we are

Alana Brennan, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Global Health. Her research focuses on the intersection of infectious diseases, particularly HIV, and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in sub-Saharan Africa. Her research has been instrumental in understanding the health transitions in this region, highlighting the emergence of NCDs as major public health challenges due to increased life expectancy. She is particularly interested in understanding aging populations on antiretroviral therapy (ART) and her work has expanded to include the impact of conditions such as hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes within this demographic. This research has led to the development of the NHLS Multimorbidity cohort, enabling a comprehensive assessment of diabetes care needs and the influence of HIV and/or TB on diabetes management.

Infectious disease; Health Systems

Jonathan Buonocore, ScD, is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health. His research interests are in evaluating the impacts, benefits, and tradeoffs of technology and policy choices in energy, transportation, agricultural practices, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. To assist in these evaluations, he develops tools that incorporate environmental risk assessment, life cycle assessment, and environmental economics with the goal of placing health, climate, environmental, and other outcomes into a framework to aid decision-making.

Climate change, the planet, and health; Cities and health

Timothy Callaghan, PhD, is the Co-Director of The Politics and Health Lab and an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy, and Management. His research focuses on how politics, policy, and place work together to influence health in America. He has conducted extensive research on individual health attitudes and behaviors, with a particular emphasis on understanding and overcoming vaccine hesitancy. He has also carried out considerable research studying public experiences with Medicaid, substance abuse, and the 988 mental health lifeline. Dr. Callaghan also studies health access and outcomes for vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on studying rural health.

Health Systems

Trish Elliott, DrPH, is a Clinical Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences. Her academic and practice interests include using mixed methods approaches to understand and improve access to services among youth and families who have been pushed to the margins. She is particularly interested in adolescent and family access to health services, the intersection of mental health and juvenile justice, school health, and health policies at the local, state, and federal levels. Since 2014, she has worked as the evaluator of a cross-sectoral program based in a public interest law firm to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline via access to mental health services.  Dr. Elliott has expertise in workforce development and is the PI the School Health Institute for Education and Leadership Development (SHIELD) which provides all mandatory professional development trainings for school nurses in Massachusetts.

School health, Mental Health and substance use

Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, PhD, MPH, is the Executive Director of Children’s HealthWatch and a Research Associate Professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management. She is an applied health services researcher with methodological expertise in qualitative, survey, and mixed methods. Her research focuses on children and families, health, the intersections of race/ethnicity and nativity, and the structural and policy factors underpinning these relationships. In particular, her expertise is in health inequities experienced by families with very young children and immigrant families and their children. While her core expertise is in access to basic needs (like food, housing, or energy security), health inequities, and social policy, she also has interest in the ways environment (neighborhood characteristics, climate/exposures, built environment) are influenced by policy and how in turn all these influence child and family health, health care utilization, and economic well-being.

Health inequities; Health systems; School health

M. Patricia Fabian, ScD, is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Associate Director at the Institute for Global Sustainability. She founded the Sustainable Built Environment Lab which researches environmental health disparities and interventions in the built environment, with a focus on sustainability, climate resilience, and actionable research. She is co-principal investigator in the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN), co-directs a community engaged research study to build resilience to extreme heat in environmental justice communities, and is principal investigator of several studies of indoor air quality, climate & sustainability in K-12 schools and low-income housing. She leads highly interdisciplinary teams and is a faculty affiliate of the BUSPH Center for Climate and Health and the BU Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. Dr. Fabian’s research group has published over 100 articles in the peer-reviewed literature, and she has been quoted in multiple media outlets. She was a Steering Committee member for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs on the 80×50 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Study and currently serves on the Massachusetts Climate Science Advisory Panel.

Climate change, the planet, and health; Cities and health; School health

Nafisa Halim, MA, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor of Global Health. She is an applied sociologist with research interests in developing and testing interventions to improve pregnancy and childbirth outcomes among women with a history of abuse. Her current work focuses on the effect of antenatal screening for sickle cell disease on intimate partner violence in the sickle cell belt in central India. She also recently led a systematic review documenting IPV effects on maternal mental health during pregnancy and the postnatal period, an intervention for men to prevent women’s IPV victimization in Bangladesh, and examined using a cluster randomized controlled trial the efficacy of a gender-training intervention targeting men and community leaders to improve gender attitudes and reduce IPV perpetration in men in Tanzania.

Women’s health

Dr. Patricia Hibberd, MD, PhD, is the Chair and Professor of Global Health, and Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases. Dr. Hibberd is a practicing infectious disease consultant who also leads a clinical and translational research program focusing on the prevention and treatment of childhood pneumonia, neonatal sepsis, and diarrhea—the leading killers of children under age 5 worldwide. She has worked in India for 20 years, and her research in India has been funded by NIH/NICHD’s Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research since 2008. She is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Malawi and by Saving Lives at Birth in Pakistan for the development of novel point of care diagnostics for pneumonia in young children. Dr. Hibberd is also a Paul G. Rogers Society Ambassador for Global Health Research and is currently chair of the Data and Safety Monitoring Board for the CDC’s STRIVE Trial, testing one of the vaccines (rVSV-ZEBOV) to prevent Ebola in Sierra Leone. She has published more than 300 articles, chapters, and books and serves on advisory boards to many US and international organizations.

Infectious disease, children’s health, school health

Phillip Hwang, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. As a neuroepidemiologist, his primary research focuses on modifiable lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, diet, and social engagement, across the life course on risk and resilience for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). He also conducts research on traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, as well as use of digital technologies to assess cognition and facilitate more inclusive and representative research around ADRD.

Aging and health

Allegra Gordon, ScD, is an Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences. She is a social epidemiologist who uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to understand the mental and physical health impacts of discrimination as well as the effects of gender norms and stereotypes on the health of young people across sexual orientations and gender identities. Her current work examines the relationship between gender expression and health behaviors among U.S. adolescents; the effects of online environments (particularly social media environments) on substance use and disordered eating behaviors among transgender and gender-diverse young adults; barriers to and facilitators of access to HIV prevention services and sexual health and wellbeing among transgender and gender-diverse young adults; and the harmful effects of weight stigma on the health of sexual and gender minority populations.

School systems; Health inequities

Anoop Jain, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health. Trained as a social epidemiologist, his research interests are elucidating the possible social determinants of maternal and child health in India, with a special focus on sanitation. In addition to his academic focus on sanitation issues in India, Dr. Jain is also the founding director of Sanitation and Health Rights in India (SHRI), a non-profit that improves access to toilets and safe drinking water throughout rural India. He is now building out a research platform within the organization that will allow him to further investigate how social determinants shape the health outcomes of the communities where SHRI operates.

Health inequities; Health systems

Jonathan Jay, JD, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences. He studies urban health, especially youth exposure to gun violence. He works at the intersection of data science and community health, focusing on relationships between urban environments and health and safety risks. He is the principal investigator of a career development award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) to study multilevel strategies for reducing racial disparities in youth firearm injuries. He also leads Shape-Up, a project using analytics to help city residents reduce firearm violence through environmental improvements (winner of the $100k Everytown for Gun Safety Prize and a 2019 Solver with MIT Solve). Dr. Jay is a Junior Faculty Fellow of the BU Hariri Institute for Computing and was a KL2 early career scholar of the BU Clinical & Translational Sciences Initiative. He previously served as a research fellow for the Firearm-Safety Among Children and Teens (FACTS) Consortium, led by the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and for the Computational Epidemiology Group at Boston Children’s Hospital. He also consults on public health and safety with Portland (OR) Fire & Rescue.

Mental health and substance use; Cities and health

Leonardo Martinez, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. Dr. Martinez uses epidemiological and quantitative approaches to study early-life risk factors for pediatric tuberculosis in high-burden settings, tuberculosis transmission dynamics in high-risk populations (e.g., prisoners, persons living with HIV or diabetes), and the relationship between tuberculosis and non-communicable diseases.

Infectious disease

Matt Motta, PhD, is the Co-Director of The Politics and Health Lab and an Assistant Professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management. His research focuses on a wide range of topics related to American politics, public opinion, science communication, and both health and environmental policy. He is especially interested in identifying the social and political determinants of anti-science attitudes, and investigating their health policy impact. He is also broadly interested in designing communication strategies that promote effective engagement between the public and the scientific community on politically contentious issues.

Health Systems

Collette Ncube, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. She is a social and perinatal epidemiologist with a research program focused on understanding and addressing the social and structural drivers of racial and ethnic disparities in maternal and infant health. Specifically, her work investigates the role of neighborhoods and the larger social context in producing and perpetuating these disparities over the life course and from one generation to the next. She uses novel methodologies in the operationalization and examination of structural racism.

Women’s health; Health inequities

Elaine O. Nsoesie, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health. She has expertise in the application of data science methods, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, using data from non-traditional public health sources (mobile phones, satellites, social media, etc) to address major global health challenges. Her work approaches health equity from multiple angles, including increasing representation of communities typically underrepresented in data science through programs like Data Science Africa and AIM-AHEAD; addressing bias in health data and algorithms; and using data and policy to advance racial equity. She has collaborated with local departments of health in the U.S. to improve disease surveillance systems, international organizations like UNICEF and UNDP, and served as a Data & Innovation Fellow in the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI), The President’s Office, Sierra Leone.

Health inequities; Health systems

Kimberly M. Nelson, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences. Having both a public health and psychology background, Dr. Nelson’s research focuses on understanding and intervening on psychological and structural determinants of health inequities with a particular focus on sexual health inequities among marginalized adolescents and adults. Additionally, her work focuses on the ethical and legal issues involved in sexual health research and interventions with adolescents and ways to use technology effectively and ethically for data collection and health promotion interventions.

School systems; Health Inequities

Brooke Nichols, PhD, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Global Health. She is an infectious disease mathematical modeler and health economist specializing in transmission dynamics, implementation modeling, and optimal resource allocation for pathogens including HIV, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV-2, and other pathogens of pandemic potential. Her work seeks to minimize the health and economic impact of infectious diseases through innovative quantitative approaches. Dr. Nichols leads a multi-continental research team of quantitative scientists and modellers who integrate insights from clinical science, epidemiology, health economics, and mathematical modeling to develop actionable, evidence-based strategies. Her team advances novel quantitative methods and adapts existing frameworks to design cost-effective, scalable interventions aimed at reducing transmission, morbidity, and mortality. Their work has significantly influenced national and global health policies across critical public health domains.

Infectious disease

Marcia Pescador Jimenez, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. With training in cardiovascular, environmental and aging epidemiology, her research focuses on the epidemiology of aging, specifically geographic contextual risk factors and racial/ethnic disparities. She examines the relationship between greenspace and cognitive development among children and mediation analysis between greenspace and cognitive function. Her current work focuses on novel metrics of greenspace and the urban environment using Deep Learning Algorithms and Google Street View images. She has extensive experience working with several cohort studies, including, the New England Family Study, Project Viva, the Nurses Health Studies, and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. She is currently funded through a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging which aims to quantify the role of built and natural environment on cognitive functioning and Alzheimer’s disease risk, evaluating racial/ethnic disparities.

Cities and health; Aging and health

Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, PhD, MPHE, MCHES, is Chair and Professor of Community Health Sciences. His work focuses on engaging the social determinants of health to address health inequities among populations made vulnerable by racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, incarceration, and HIV status. He conducts community-based participatory research in Puerto Rico, the continental United States, and the Caribbean region. He has several funded projects to improve primary care, HIV prevention services, health services with sexual minority men, and primary care for Latinx and transgender populations. He is also testing the implementation of medical-legal partnerships to improve health among Latinos. Dr. Rodriguez-Diaz has also conducted pandemic-related research; he is the first author of one of the most cited studies about COVID-19 infection and death risk among the US Latinx population. His work has been featured in the prestigious peer-review journal The Lancet.

Infectious disease, health inequities

Eric Rubenstein, PhD, ScM is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. His work focuses on improving the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), including Down syndrome (DS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Dr. Rubenstein’s work covers issues that impact health and well-being across the life course for people with IDD. He is currently the PI of a National Institute for Child Health and Human Development study of pregnancy in women with IDD. He has extensive work examining phenotype and service type in children on the autism spectrum. Dr. Rubenstein uses Medicaid data to examine service use and health outcomes for people with IDD who are often served by the public insurance system. His  research is motivated and continually inspired by his friends, Special Olympic athletes, and fellow advocates in the intellectual and developmental disability community.

Health Inequities

Madeleine Scammell, ScD, is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health. Her expertise is in the area of community-driven and community-based participatory research and includes the use of qualitative methods in the area of environmental health and epidemiologic studies. Her research focuses on identifying and preventing exposures that may contribute to the epidemic of chronic kidney disease in Central America known as Mesoamerican Nephropathy (MeN), specifically extreme heat and physical exertion, exposure to the herbicide glyphosate, and heavy metals. In Massachusetts, Dr. Scammell leads the Local Public Health Institute out of BUSPH, with funding from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In her own neighborhoods, Dr. Scammell co-leads the Chelsea & East Boston Heat Study, C-HEAT, examining exposure to heat and poor air quality, where we live, work and play.

She continues to develop and support mechanisms to initiate and sustain long-and short-term research relationships between community groups and scientists, and respond to community requests for scientific assistance. Dr. Scammell partners with GreenRoots, Alternatives for Community & Environment, Boston Housing Authority, and the Boston Public Health Commission.

Climate change, the planet, and health; Cities and health

Environmental Health. He is an environmental epidemiologist committed to reducing the adverse health impacts of continued climate change through research, training, and engagement. In partnership with a faculty, staff, and students from diverse disciplines, Dr. Wellenius’ research seeks to generate the actionable scientific evidence needed to ensure that our communities are as resilient, sustainable, and healthy as possible. Specifically, his group seeks to: 1) understand the adverse health impacts of extreme weather events, air pollution, and other climate-relevant hazards, 2) assess the effectiveness of strategies to reduce these adverse health impacts, and 3) leverage novel signals to provide timely and actionable insights to public health officials and other key stakeholders. For example, his recent publications highlight the risks posed by extreme heat to our physical and mental health, the limited health benefits of heat warnings and advisories, and the potential utility of data on internet search patterns and population mobility to inform public health.

Climate change, the planet, and health

Veronika J. Wirtz, MSc, PhD, is a Professor of Global Health and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Pharmaceutical Policy. Her interest and expertise include medicine price analyses, generic medicines policies, quality use of medicines, access to medicines for non-communicable diseases, and the role of the private sector to promote equitable access and efficient use of medicines in low and middle income countries. She has worked as a technical adviser for various international organizations, among them the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Alliance for Health Systems and Policy Research, Health Action International, and the Ford Foundation. She has also worked with the Ministry of Health in Mexico on various program evaluations and capacity building initiatives.

Health systems