Dear Colleagues:

Hiring and promoting faculty members who demonstrate excellence in research, education, and service is critical to advancing our shared mission to improve the health of populations. I am delighted to announce nine faculty appointments and seven faculty promotions at SPH. These outstanding faculty members have distinguished themselves in their respective areas of expertise and collectively embody our core purpose to Think. Teach. Do. For the health of all. Please join me in celebrating the appointments and promotions of the following SPH faculty.

Sean Cahill, appointed as adjunct associate professor of the practice in health law, policy & management. Professor Cahill is director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute, serves on the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission on LGBT Aging, and is associate editor at LGBT Health. He also serves as director of curriculum for the Evidence Informed Interventions Coordinating Center for Technical Assistance, a HRSA HAB-funded project working with HIV care providers at 26 sites across the US to implement interventions to improve retention in care, treatment adherence, and viral suppression. Professor Cahill is the author or coauthor of three books on LGBT policy and about 100 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and monographs on LGBT issues and HIV.

Megan Cole Brahim, appointed as assistant professor of health law, policy & management. Professor Cole Brahim’s research focuses primarily on Medicaid and safety-net populations, and how state and federal health reform efforts affect health care coverage, quality, and equity for these populations. She works predominantly with large observational data sets, applying methods in health economics and statistics. Examples of recent and ongoing work includes examining the impact of Medicaid expansion on coverage, quality of care, and service utilization for community health center patients and examining the role of insurance coverage in access to and disparities in access to behavioral health care, specialty care, and prescription drugs for safety-net patients.

Jaimie Gradus, promoted to associate professor of epidemiology. Professor Gradus recently joined the epidemiology department full-time, after working at the National Center for PTSD, VA Boston Healthcare System. Her research in psychiatric epidemiology centers on military service, PTSD, and suicide. In addition to her studies in US veterans, she has a longstanding collaboration with Aarhus University in Denmark and has published extensively on mental health as both a predictor and an outcome among Danish citizens. For example, Professor Gradus has shown stress disorder increases the risks of subsequent all-cause mortality, suicide, gastrointestinal disorders, and cardiovascular disease, but not cancer. She is currently using machine learning approaches to develop predictive models of suicide and post-trauma psychopathology in the Danish population.

David Jernigan, appointed as professor of health law, policy & management. Professor Jernigan is a sociologist with expertise and interests in alcohol policy, organizing and campaigning, and policy change. He is currently senior policy advisor to CityHealth, an initiative working with the nation’s 40 largest cities to adopt a suite of policies that will improve population health and health equity. He is the former director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University and has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization.

Kevin J. Lane, appointed as assistant professor of environmental health. Professor Lane joins us from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and is a PhD graduate of SPH. He brings an extensive background in GIS, where he has worked in academia, government, and nonprofit sectors. His research focuses on the fields of air pollution, built environment, and urbanization impacts on health in local, national, and international settings. He has worked extensively on monitoring and modeling traffic-related air pollution with a specific emphasis on ultrafine particulate matter health impacts. Recently, he developed new big data spatial methods that link birth and mortality repositories with remote sensing and social polarization metrics to examine multi-stressor health impacts as a researcher at the Center for Research on Environmental and Social Stressors in Housing Across the Life Course (CRESSH).

Sarah Ketchen Lipson, appointed as assistant professor of health law, policy & management. Professor Lipson joins us from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is a mental health services researcher with a focus on access to care among adolescents and young adults. Professor Lipson is the associate director of the Healthy Minds Network for Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health, an international research-to-practice network, and co-principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Study, the most comprehensive, national survey of college student mental health.

Chunyu Liu, appointed as research associate professor of biostatistics. Professor Liu, a 2007 graduate from our Biostatistics PhD Program, returns to the department after working as a scientist at Biogen Idec, and more recently, as a statistical geneticist for the Framingham Heart Study. Professor Liu brings experience and expertise in statistical genetics, with interest in mitochondrial effects on complex diseases and the effect of alcohol consumption on DNA methylation.

Mark Logue, promoted to associate professor of biostatistics. Professor Logue currently holds a primary appointment of associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine. He has an extensive research record in the area of statistical genetics, both in applied and statistical methodological development. Professor Logue has made several important contributions that have informed science pertaining to genetic risk variant in the area of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Timothy Naimi, promoted to professor of community health sciences. Professor Naimi holds a primary appointment of professor of general internal medicine at the School of Medicine and is a physician and alcohol epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center. He received his MD from the University of Massachusetts and his MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to coming to BU, Professor Naimi was a clinician for the US Indian Health Service and a senior epidemiologist with the alcohol team at CDC. His current research interests include binge drinking, youth drinking, health effects of low-dose ethanol, and the impact of alcohol control policies on youth and adult alcohol consumption patterns.

Nicole Prudent, promoted to associate professor of the practice in community health sciences. Professor Prudent holds a primary appointment as clinical associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine. She is a trusted and established voice in the Haitian community and works to improve the health care of underserved patients in Boston. She has received numerous awards and is a role model for physicians and physicians in training. At SPH, Professor Prudent is an active member of the Maternal Child Health Center of Excellence Advisory Board, a regular guest lecturer in SPH courses, and a key mentor and practicum supervisor for many SPH students.

Julia Raifman, appointed as assistant professor of health law, policy & management. Prior to joining SPH, Professor Raifman earned her ScD at the Harvard School of Public Health and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She uses econometric methods to research policy drivers of health inequities and structural barriers and facilitators of HIV/STI prevention and treatment. Her ongoing research includes studies on LGBT rights and health, on criminal justice policies and racial disparities, and on HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) implementation.

Emily Rothman, promoted to professor of community health sciences. Professor Rothman earned her ScD at Harvard University, where she has maintained an appointment at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Since then, she has established herself as an internationally recognized scientist in the area of dating and sexual violence prevention, commercial sex and pornography impacts on health, and community-based efforts to address violence. She established and now leads the Violence Prevention Research Unit that has been active in generating grant proposals and research reports as well as serving as a nidus for trainees and for coordination of a seminar series.

Abby Rudolph, promoted to associate professor of epidemiology. Professor Rudolph is an infectious disease epidemiologist and an expert in network analysis. Her research incorporates social network and spatial approaches to better understand the independent and combined influence of individual, network (sociometric and egocentric), and environmental (built and social) factors on disease transmission dynamics, recruitment patterns, risk behaviors, and health service use among marginalized populations. She has published extensively on people affected with HIV and opioid addiction.

Madeleine K. Scammell, promoted to associate professor of environmental health. Professor Scammell is an expert in community-driven and interdisciplinary environmental health research, primarily in low-income communities with numerous social and environmental stressors. She has produced more than 50 publications that include peer-reviewed journal articles, reports, and papers in practice-oriented publications. Professor Scammell is the recipient of the JPB Environmental Health Fellows Award at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and, more recently, the prestigious Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) R01 award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to examine environmental and occupational causes of chronic kidney disease among workers in El Salvador.

Allan Walkey, appointed as associate professor of health law, policy & management. Professor Walkey holds a primary appointment as an associate professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the School of Medicine and is a pulmonary and critical care physician. He is also co-director of the Evans Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences. Professor Walkey’s work uses quantitative analytics of large databases to study variation in critical care delivery to identify effective methods of delivering and improving health care. In addition to receiving awards for his mentoring, Professor Walkey received research honors from the United States Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality for the Outstanding Research Article of 2011, the Young Investigator Award from the American College of Chest Physicians, and the Robert Dawson Evans Junior Faculty Merit Award from the School of Medicine.

Xiaoling Zhang, appointed as assistant professor of biostatistics. Professor Zhang holds a primary appointment in the Biomedical Genetics Section in the Department of Medicine at the School of Medicine. She received her PhD from the Bioinformatics Program at Boston University. Professor Zhang continued her training as a post-doctoral fellow in the Section of Computational Biomedicine at Boston University prior to joining the Framingham Heart Study and the Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Human Genomics Branch of NHLBI as a research fellow. Her research focuses on the development and application of statistical genetics and bioinformatics approaches to analyze large-scale genetics, epigenetics, and genomics data to investigate complex disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

Congratulations to these members of our faculty on this well-deserved recognition of their professional accomplishments, their contributions to SPH, and most importantly their impact on the field of public health. Additionally, I would like to thank Joline Durant and Clara Pereira in the faculty resources office for all of their work in support of these appointments and promotions.

Warmly,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean, Robert A. Knox Professor
sgalea@bu.edu

 

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