Research Highlights
Research Highlights
Special Projects
Maternal and Child Health
MCH major Sumaiya Mamdani, right.
A prescription for quality of life
Majoring in maternal and child health at SPH means broadening your scope to improving the health of youth and families, too.
The faculty members are especially interested in socially vulnerable populations and the environments, behaviors, and policies that affect their long-term health and well-being.
Biostatistics professor James Neaton.
The School of Public Health is coming at the HIV/AIDS issue from all sides and all over the globe to stop transmission, help those who have already contracted the disease, and assist other countries in developing good policies for dealing with the virus.
SPH professor of biostatistics James Neaton and his colleagues have conducted the two largest HIV treatment trials done to date, following more than 10,000 people in 33 countries in randomized studies.
SPH assistant professor Jean Abraham.
Over the past year, Abraham served in Washington, D.C., as one of ten senior economists on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. She was charged with examining the economic implications of health care reform and ways to pay for it.
What surprised her?
“I learned that politics can trump good economic policy. For example, we had some good ideas on how to change the formula the federal government uses to reimburse states for Medicaid costs as a way to reduce geographic variation and generate savings. But the political insiders rejected the idea, saying that certain senators from higher-cost states would never support it. The discussion just stopped immediately.”
Pesticide exposure can be deadly in Minnesota’s fertile Red River Valley.
How the environment interacts with genes to lead to chronic disease is the research focus for faculty in the school’s Division of Environmental Health Sciences.
That environmental influence is called the “envirome” and it includes socioeconomic status, behavior, lifestyle, nutrition, pollutant chemicals, environmental toxicants, and how individuals interact with each other.
“We believe in the ‘envirome,’” says EnHS head William Toscano.