Thursday, December 6, 2018

8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

breakfast (doors open), 8 a.m.

Hiebert Lounge
72 East Concord Street
Boston

Services for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People Provided

#BUSPHSymposia

Livestreaming Available During Event

More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By the year 2030, this will have increased to two-thirds. Urban living is an ubiquitous exposure for health. The day will bring together scholars from around the world to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with creating health in urban contexts. Presenters will also discuss methods that can advance urban health scholarship and feature case studies from cities that have invested in population health, synthesizing the state of the science of urban health.

Cohosted with Boston University Initiative on Cities and Yale Institute for Global Health.

Agenda

8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.

Breakfast and Informal Greetings

8:30 a.m. – 8:45 a.m.

OPENING REMARKS

Welcome

Sandro Galea

Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health

David Vlahov

Associate Dean for Research and Professor, Yale School of Nursing, and Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health

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David Vlahov is associate dean for research and professor at the Yale School of Nursing and a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. His primary area of focus has been on urban health. His studies in Baltimore, Harlem, and the Bronx, which have served as a platform for subsequent individual, community, and policy intervention studies. This work has contributed new knowledge to promote health equity. Vlahov was the founding president of the International Society for Urban Health. He has been a visiting professor at the medical school in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and served as an expert consultant to the World Health Organization’s Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan. Vlahov is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, has edited three books on urban health, and has published over 654 scholarly papers. He was the principal investigator of the Rockefeller Foundation project on the Roundtable for Urban Living Environment Research on urban health metrics and a member of the WHO Knowledge Network for Urban Settlements as part of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. Vlahov served on the New York City Board of Health, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine currently serving on the institute’s Board of Global Health.

PART ONE: HEALTH CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN CITIES 

8:45 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.

CITY TRENDS

Inequities in Cities and in Urban Health

Patricia O’Campo

Vice President of Research, St. Michael’s Hospital, and Professor, School of Public Health, University of Toronto Dalla Lana

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Patricia O’Campo is vice president of research at St. Michael’s Hospital and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She is an internationally renowned social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the health impacts of complex urban social problems experienced by low-income populations. Through her outstanding scholarship and dedicated partnerships with affected communities, O’Campo has advanced methodologies and generated strong evidence for effective solutions to reduce urban health disparities.

Climate Change and the Health of Urban Populations

Patrick L. Kinney

Beverly Brown Professor of Urban Health, Boston University School of Public Health

Aging Populations

Kathleen Cagney

Professor of Sociology and Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago

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Kathleen Cagney is Professor of Sociology and the College and Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her work examines social inequality and its relationship to health with a focus on neighborhood, race, and aging and the life course. She brings urban sociological theory and methods to research on health, including new approaches to characterizing a neighborhood’s influence. Cagney is director of the Population Research Center, co-director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging, and a Senior Fellow at the National Opinion Research Center. She also directs the University of Chicago’s Health Services Research Training Program.

The Role of Health Departments in Creating Healthy Cities

Daniel Kass

Senior Vice President for Environmental Health, Vital Strategies, Inc.

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Daniel Kass is the senior vice president for environmental health at Vital Strategies, Inc., a global non-governmental organization that strengthens public health systems in low- and middle-income countries. His work currently involves building capacity in public health ministries and civil society organizations to understand and address ambient and household air pollution; improve environmental health hazard and exposure surveillance, and to promote public engagement in policymaking. Prior to joining Vital Strategies, he served for seven years as the Deputy Commissioner for the Division of Environmental Health Service at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where he oversaw a variety of enforcement, policy, and research programs and a staff of 1,000. Kass previously served as assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Environmental Surveillance and Policy, which provides epidemiologic, analytic, policy analysis, and other services to the department and public. Kass also founded and for 12 years directed the Hunter College Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. He is appointed to the Board of Scientific Counselors for NIEHS’s National Toxicology Program, was chair of the CDC Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Environmental Health/ATSDR, and serves on the advisory committee for the Columbia University Children’s Environmental Health Center. Kass holds an ScB from Brown University and an MSPH from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and completed doctoral studies in Public Administration at New York University.

Crime and Criminal Justice

Matt Vogel

Associate Professor, Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri–St. Louis, and Researcher, OTB – Research for the Built Environment, TU Delft, the Netherlands

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Matt Vogel is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and a researcher at OTB–Research for the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. His recent research examines the consequences of residential mobility for youth offending, the spatial dimensions of neighborhood influences on adolescent behavior, and the relationships between population dynamics and crime. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Moderated by: Kelly Henning

Public Health Program Lead, Bloomberg Philanthropies

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Kelly Henning is a medical doctor and epidemiologist trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and public health in the United States of America. She received her epidemiology training in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Subsequently, Henning has been an associate professor in infectious disease and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Henning was the Director of the newly formed Division of Epidemiology at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 2003 – 2006 before joining the Bloomberg Philanthropies in January 2007. She currently directs global health programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, including the $1 billion, 16 year Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use—a global project aimed at curbing the tobacco epidemic in low and middle income countries and the Bloomberg Global Road Safety Program—a 10 year, $250 million global program to reduce road traffic deaths in low and middle income countries.

9:45 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.

RESOURCES IN CITIES

Housing

Roshanak Mehdipanah

Assistant Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan

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Roshanak Mehdipanah is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She specializes in innovative research methods, including realist evaluations and concept mapping to develop conceptual frameworks linking complex interventions to health. Mehdipanah has led several projects on housing and health, including health evaluations of housing policies on affordability and discrimination within the United States. Prior to joining the faculty in HBHE, she was an investigator with the SOPHIE project (Evaluating the Impact of Structural Policies on Health Inequalities) funded by the European Union. Within this project, Mehdipanah led a four-year evaluation of an urban renewal policy and its effects on the health and health inequalities in some of Barcelona’s neighborhoods. Her current research portfolio focuses on aspects of urban health, including urban renewal, planning, housing, and gentrification. She holds a PhD from the University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain and an MSc from the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Transportation

Mark Nieuwenhuijsen

Professor, Barcelona Institute for Global Health

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Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen is a world-leading expert in environmental exposure assessment, epidemiology, and health risk/impact assessment with a strong focus on healthy urban living. His main interest is the link between urban and transport planning and the environment. Nieuwenhuijsen’s research centers on the promotion of green space and active transportation and the reduction of cars in cities. He is the author of the recently published book, Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning.

Children and Adolescents in Cities

Shakira F. Suglia

Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University

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Shakira F. Suglia is an associate professor of epidemiology in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Her research examines the impact of social determinants on health across the life course, focusing on childhood exposures to violence, housing, and neighborhood factors. She is particularly interested in learning how these social factors can affect cardiometabolic health through a stress pathway, and has dedicated most of her work to understanding the impact of childhood adversities on cardiometabolic health. Suglia is the principal investigator of the Boricua Youth Study – Health Assessment, where she examines how stress stemming from multiple social factors in childhood and adolescence impacts cardiometabolic health outcomes among Puerto Rican young adults living in the South Bronx, New York, and the San Juan metro area in Puerto Rico. In this ethnically homogenous population living in two different social contexts, she will examine both the factors that exacerbate the social stress and cardiometabolic health relation and those that may buffer the impact of stress on health. Suglia is also the co-PI of the Disparities in Biological Aging Study, part of the Child Health and Development Studies. This unique cohort of adults followed from birth will allow for the examination of the associations between childhood and adult socioeconomic status and social stressors on methylation age, genome-wide methylation, and telomere length in adulthood. This work can thus extend our understanding of how stress “gets under the skin” to alter health. Prior to joining Emory University, she was on the faculty of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where she currently holds an adjunct faculty appointment. Suglia earned an MS in epidemiology from the University at Albany, State University of New York and an ScD in environmental health and epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Economic Conditions

Atheendar Venkataramani

Assistant Professor, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

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Atheendar S. Venkataramani is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and a staff physician at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. Venkataramani is a health economist who studies the life-course origins of health and socioeconomic inequality. His current research focuses on elucidating the effects of early life interventions on adult health and well-being; understanding the relationship between economic opportunities and health behaviors and outcomes; and examining the spillover health impacts of social policies. This work spans both domestic and international settings, and is currently funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Venkataramani completed an MD at Washington University, a PhD in health policy (economics) at Yale University, and a BS in biology and economics at Duke University. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine–Global Primary Care at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Improving Access to Health Foods in Cities

Monica Wang

Assistant Professor, Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, and Instructor, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Moderated by: David Dudley

Editor, CityLab

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David Dudley is the executive editor of CityLab, a digital publication that focuses on the biggest ideas and most pressing challenges facing the world’s metropolitan areas and neighborhoods. Published by Atlantic Media since 2011, CityLab covers 21st-century urban issues like sustainability, climate resilience, and economic inequity with an emphasis on revealing solutions. Prior to joining CityLab in 2016, Dudley was a features editor at AARP The Magazine and the editor-in-chief of Urbanite, a monthly magazine based in Baltimore, Maryland. He’s also been senior editor of Baltimore Magazine, senior editor of Cornell Alumni Magazine, and a staff writer at Baltimore City Paper. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.

10:45 a.m. – 11:00 a.m

Break

PART TWO: METHODS AND APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING HEALTH IN CITIES

11:00 a.m. – noon

THROUGH THE LENSES OF OTHER DISCIPLINES

History

Richard Rodger

Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Edinburgh

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Richard Rodger is a professor of economic and social history at Edinburgh University. He previously held academic posts at Liverpool, Leicester, and Kansas Universities. Rodger was the editor of Urban History for 21 years, a co-organizer of the Urban History Group annual conference, and general editor of the series Historical Urban Studies (35 books published by Ashgate 1996–2011). While at Leicester, he was director of the Centre for Urban History and director of the East Midlands Oral History Archive. His current project, “Mapping Edinburgh” enables urban historians and the general public to develop historical and contemporary maps of the city in a one-stop process from a simple spreadsheet of data. His prize-winning monograph, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century, is just one of a dozen books. Rodger has contributed numerous articles on urban history to European journals, including Storia Urbana (Italy), Genèses (France), Historia Urbana (Spain), and Ler História: Cidades e Espaços Urbanos (Portugal). He holds an MA and a PhD from Edinburgh University.

A Systems Science Approach to Urban Health

Danielle C. Ompad

Associate Professor, College of Global Public Health, New York University, and Deputy Director, Rory Meyer College of Nursing’s Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, New York University

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Danielle C. Ompad is an associate professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health, the deputy director of the NYU Rory Meyer College of Nursing’s Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, and the director of CDUHR’s Dissemination and Implementation Core. Ompad is an epidemiologist whose work focuses on the areas of urban health, HIV, illicit drug use, and adult access to vaccines. She has worked in urban settings in the Dominican Republic, the country of Georgia, the Philippines, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United States. Ompad was a member of the Synergy Circle of the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings, a network created by the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health to consider the role of urbanization in health outcomes, and was a consultant to the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization on urban health issues. She is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Urban Health. Ompad has a publication record of 119 peer-reviewed articles and eight book chapters, seven of which are concerned with urban health. In addition to a number of methodologic papers and commentaries related to urban health research, she contributed to two important WHO reports: the WHO Centre for Health Development’s Our cities, our health, our future report and the WHO-UNHABITAT joint report on Hidden Cities in 2010. Ompad holds a BS in biology from Bowie State University and an MHS and a PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Health Services Research: Studying Healthcare Services in the City

Michael K. Gusmano

Interim Chair, Department of Health Policy and Behavioral Health Science, and Associate Professor, Health Policy, School of Public Health, Rutgers University

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Michael K. Gusmano, an associate professor of health policy, is the interim chair of the Department of Health Policy and Behavioral Health Science and the director of the Concentration on Health Systems and Policy at the Rutgers University School of Public Health. He is also a research scholar at the Hastings Center and a visiting fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York. His research examines the politics of health and social policy. He co-directs the World Cities Project, which compares large city health systems across the world. Gusmano is the author of Debating Modern Medical Technologies: The Politics of Safety, Effectiveness and Patient Access (with Karen J. Maschke; ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2018), Health Care in World Cities: New York, London, and Paris (with Victor G. Rodwin and Daniel Weisz; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Healthy Voices/Unhealthy Silence (with Colleen Grogan; Georgetown University Press, 2007), Growing Older in World Cities (with Victor G. Rodwin; Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), and more than 100 scholarly articles. From 1995 to 1997, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University. He serves as the international editor of the Journal of Aging and Social Policy, associate editor for Health Economics, Policy and Law, and is on the board of editors of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law and the editorial committee of the Hastings Center Report. Gusmano received his doctorate in political science from the University of Maryland College Park.

Cells-to-Society Approaches

Guia Guffanti

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Director, Computational Genomics Lab, McLean Hospital

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Guia Guffanti is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and holds a joint appointment as an associate neuroscientist in the Division of Depression and Anxiety Disorders at McLean Hospital, which is affiliated with HMS. Guffanti earned a PhD in molecular medicine from the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Milan in Italy, and trained as a statistical geneticist through her post-doctoral years at the University of California, Irvine. For five years thereafter, she was an assistant professor of clinical neurobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. Her primary research interests are in the area of human genetics with application to the study of the genetic variants underlying neuropsychiatric complex disorders. Guffanti has worked on the genetics of autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder over the span of 10 years. She has expertise in large data processing, including DNA microarrays and their integration with brain imaging, whole genome sequencing, and RNA sequencing for deep investigation of the transcriptome. Her research investigates how the individual genetic blueprint influences higher brain functions. Areas of current interest include structural variation of the genome as related to brain functions, non-coding genome biology, neuroepigenetics, and computational genomics.

Moderated by: Nineequa Blanding

Director, Health and Wellness, The Boston Foundation

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Nineequa Blanding is the Director of Health and Wellness at the Boston Foundation—one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations that devotes its resources to building and sustaining a vital, prosperous city and region, where justice and opportunity are extended to everyone. In this role, Blanding oversees the development, implementation and evaluation of one of the Foundation’s strategic priorities to address the health needs of the people of Greater Boston with a special focus on low-income people of color. Prior to joining the Boston Foundation, Blanding held several significant progressive leadership positions with the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC). She was previously the Director of the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) Obesity and Hypertension Demonstration Project—a three year, $4.6 million Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) funded effort to develop effective strategies to address the inequities that contribute to the gap in these health outcomes among residents of color. Blanding later served as the Associate Director of the Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Division and the Associate Director of the Office of Health Equity at BPHC. She has over 12 years of experience in program planning, research and evaluation in academia, health care and local health department settings, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Blanding also has years of research experience in neuroscience with notable researchers at Emory and Duke University, specifically focusing on the mechanisms underlying fear learning and memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) previously awarded her a post-baccalaureate training fellowship to examine the trauma-related risk factors for PTSD. She has co-authored several publications, including the examination of the effects of early life trauma as a risk factor for adult psychopathology. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Spelman College and a Master’s with Honors in Public Health from Long Island University. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she enjoys living in Boston and currently resides in Dorchester.

Noon – 1:00 p.m.

APPROACHES

Urban Design

Oliver Gruebner

Senior Researcher, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

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Oliver Gruebner is a health geographer who successfully combines methodologies from geography and epidemiology to assess population health risk. He earned a PhD in geography from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, working within the priority program 1233 “Mega Cities Mega Challenges” funded by the German Research Foundation. His work at that time focused on the mental health of the urban slum population in Dhaka, Bangladesh. During a postdoctoral year in Tanzania and Kenya, he was part of a National Centre of Competence in Research “North-South” project, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which allowed him to investigate the moderating effects of place of residence on infant mortality risk. During his postdoctoral years in the United States, Gruebner was again sponsored by the DFG to conduct research in the urban and post-disaster mental health context. He was among the first to use digital and spatial epidemiological approaches to show that social media data from Twitter can be used for mental health surveillance, such as to identify specific emotions clustering in space and time. Currently, he is employed by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Zürich, Switzerland, sponsored by an SNSF National Research Program (NRP74 smarter health care) to study the geographic variation of clinical guidelines and influencing factors in Switzerland. Gruebner serves as the director of an international summer school program on spatial epidemiology, social media, and urban mental health that is celebrating its tenth anniversary in Berlin in 2018. He further serves as the vice president of the Centre for Contemporary Concerns. In addition, he is a research fellow with the Competence Centre for Mental Health at the University of Zürich and with the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health.

Community-Based Participatory Research: An Approach to Research in the Urban Context

Barbara A. Israel

Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, and Director, Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center

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Barbara A. Israel is a professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, and director of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center. Her widely published work focuses on the social and physical environmental determinants of health and health inequities; the relationship among stress, social support, control, and physical and mental health; and community-based participatory research. Israel has extensive experience conducting CBPR in collaboration with partners in diverse communities. Since 1995, she has worked together with academic and community partners to establish and maintain the Detroit URC. One of the goals of the center is to foster and support the development of equitable community-academic partnerships focused on understanding and addressing health inequities in the City of Detroit. The Detroit URC has facilitated the establishment of numerous such CBPR partnerships affiliated with the center, which are engaged in multiple National Institutes of Health and foundation-funded basic etiologic research, intervention research, and training projects aimed at increasing knowledge and addressing the factors associated with health inequities. Israel is actively involved in several of these CBPR partnerships and projects examining, for example, the environmental triggers of childhood asthma and strategies for reducing them, the social and physical environmental determinants of cardiovascular disease, the impact of physical activity interventions on cardiovascular health, the translation of research findings into policy change, and capacity building for conducting CBPR. She holds a DPH and an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Angela G. Reyes

Founder and Executive Director, Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation

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Angela G. Reyes is the founder and executive director of the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation. Reyes has been committed to working in and serving the Southwest Detroit Latino community for more than 40 years, dedicating much of her life to working with “in-risk” and gang-involved youth. She is an international consultant and speaker about issues affecting the Latino community, including cultural awareness, youth gangs and violence, substance abuse, immigration, education reform, community-based participatory research, policy development, and community organizing. Reyes holds an MPH from the University of Michigan.

Multilevel Perspectives to Urban Health

Dustin T. Duncan

Associate Professor, Population Health, School of Medicine, New York University

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Dustin T. Duncan is an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at the New York University School of Medicine, where he directs NYU’s Spatial Epidemiology Lab. At NYU, he is also a faculty affiliate at NYU Abu Dhabi, the College of Global Public Health, the Population Center, the Center for Data Science, and the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research. Duncan is a social and spatial epidemiologist. His research broadly seeks to understand how social and contextual factors, especially neighborhood characteristics (such as the built environment and the social environment), influence population health, with a particular focus on HIV epidemiology and prevention and emerging work on sleep epidemiology and promotion. Duncan’s work has an emphasis on minority health and health disparities, especially among sexual minority populations and in particular gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. His research has a strong US focus, but recent work is beginning to span the globe (including studies in Paris, London, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi). Methodologically, his research utilizes a geospatial lens to apply spatially explicit approaches such as computer-based geographic information systems, web-based geospatial technologies, real-time geospatial technologies, and geospatial modeling techniques. For instance, his work applies emerging geospatial technologies such as global positioning system devices and smartphones to, in part, examine mobility and social networks in neighborhoods. His research and that of the field of spatial epidemiology are summarized in his forthcoming co-edited book, Neighborhoods and Health (2nd edition) with Ichiro Kawachi (Oxford University Press, 2018). Duncan’s research appears in leading public health, medical, geography, criminology, and demography journals. He has authored more than 120 publications and book chapters, and his research has appeared in major media outlets, including US News and World Report, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN. His work also extends out of the research world and into classrooms through invited talks, multiple guest lectures across institutions, and his courses, including Connecting Neighborhoods and Health: An Introduction to Spatial Epidemiology—offered at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Assessing Neighborhoods in Epidemiology—offered at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Duncan’s recent work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Verizon Foundation, Aetna Foundation, and HIV Prevention Trials Network. He is an associate editor of Behavioral Medicine and serves on the editorial board of Spatial Demography, Geospatial Health, American Journal of Health Promotion, AIMS Public Health, and the Journal of Public Health and Emergency. Duncan completed his doctorate and the Alonzo Smythe Yerby Postdoctoral Fellowship, both in social epidemiology, at Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Environmental Health Assessment

Carlos Dora

Former Coordinator, Public Health and the Environment Department, World Health Organization, and Visiting Professor, Columbia University Medical Center

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Carlos Dora has had a distinguished career in global public health and environment. Until recently, he coordinated the World Health Organization’s work on the health impacts of sector policies (energy, transport, housing, extractive industry). He recently led the development of a new Urban Health Initiative to strengthen health systems’ capacity to support health, climate, and air quality benefits from urban policies and the renewal of the WHO global program on air quality and health, which now monitors related SDGs (3, 7, and 11). Prior to that, Dora led WHO’s work on “Health in a Green Economy,” analyzing the health benefits from climate change mitigation policies, and contributed to the thinking on health indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals. He is an expert in Health Impact Assessments, and supported the development of a health protocol for the Environment Impact Assessment UNECE Convention. Dora has led international research about the perceptions and communication of science and of health risks. He led WHO’s engagement in promoting the inclusion of health into global efforts in sustainable energy and transport as well as for the mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants (Sustainable Energy for All, GACC, Sustainable Mobility for All and SLOCAT, Climate and Clean Air Coalition). In the past, he has helped establish an inter-ministerial process for transport health and environment in Europe, and has worked in health risk assessments of radiation and chemicals in the former Soviet Union. His previous experience includes working in academia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, at the World Bank, as a senior policy advisor to the WHO Director General, as well as in clinical medicine and the organization of primary health care in his home country, Brazil. He has served on science/policy committees at national (US, China) and international (ICSU) levels, and his publications cover the health impacts of sector policies, health in sustainable development goals, and framing health risk communication strategies. Dora holds an MD from the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil and an MSc and a PhD in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Urban Planning: Leveraging the Urban Planning System to Shape Healthy Cities

Helen Pineo

Lecturer in Sustainable and Healthy Built Environments, Bartlett Faculty, Built Environment, University College London

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Helen Pineo is a lecturer in sustainable and healthy built environments in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. Prior to entering academe, she worked for ten years as an urban planner (MRTPI) integrating health and sustainability into new development and planning policy. Pineo led the Building Research Establishment’s Future Cities program and BREEAM Communities standard, involving research and advisory projects for government and private-sector organizations in the United Kingdom and internationally. Previously, she worked at the Local Government Association supporting planners and politicians with policy development and training in the areas of climate change, low carbon energy, and health. Her research focuses on the translation of health and well-being evidence into built environment policy and design. Since 2015, she has worked as a Design Council Cabe Built Environment Expert and currently sits on a number of government and industry steering groups, including for the NHS England Healthy New Towns Programme.

Moderated by: Jalonne L. White-Newsome

Senior Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

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Jalonne L. White-Newsome is the senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation. She is responsible for the Environment Program’s grant portfolio on Climate Resilient and Equitable Water Systems and grantmaking addressing the intersection of climate change and public health, and is a member of the Kresge Operationalizing Racial Equity Team working to address institutional racism in the foundation and beyond. Before joining Kresge in early 2016, White-Newsome served as director of federal policy at West Harlem Environmental Action Inc., where she was involved with leading national campaigns and a 42-member national coalition of environmental justice organizations. Her work helped ensure that the concerns of low-income communities of color were integrated into federal policy, particularly on clean air, climate change, and health issues. White-Newsome’s career has spanned state government, academia, environmental and science-based advocacy organizations, nonprofit, and private industry, where she spent over 10 years working as a production engineer in facilities across the United States. She is an adjunct professor in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, and continues to engage in research on climate, health, and equity. White-Newsome is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Change and Society, and is serving as a lead author for the human health chapter for the 4th National Climate Assessment. She is best known for her research uncovering the disproportionate health impacts of climate change on the elderly and the response and preparation of local health departments to handle extreme heat. She serves on the board of US Climate Action Network, is co-chair for Health & Environmental Funders Network, and is a 2017 Fellow with the Funders’ Network. White-Newsome has been recognized for her advocacy by several organizations, including The Michigan League of Conservation Voters Advocate of the Year in 2017, Kingdom Living Temple “Friends of the Environment Award” in 2017, and “The Clean Power Plan Enforcer” by Grist Magazine in 2016. A native of Detroit, White-Newsome earned a PhD in environmental health sciences from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Southern Methodist University

1:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch

PART THREE: CASE STUDIES IN URBAN HEALTH

1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

CityHealth: Policies for Today’s Urban Health Challenges

Brian C. Castrucci

Chief Executive Officer, de Beaumont Foundation

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Brian C. Castrucci is the chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation. Castrucci is a disruptor, instigator, and fierce advocate for public health. In just six years, he has helped build the Foundation into a leading voice in health philanthropy and public health practice. An award-winning epidemiologist with 10 years of experience working in state and local health departments, Castrucci brings a unique background to the philanthropic sector that allows him to shape and implement visionary and practical initiatives and partnerships and bring together research and practice to improve public health. Under his leadership, the de Beaumont Foundation is driving change to improve population health, foster collaboration between public health and primary care, and strengthen the nation’s public health infrastructure. Among the projects he has spearheaded are CityHealth, the BUILD Health Challenge, and the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey. Castrucci is an editor and contributing author to The Practical Playbook: Public Health and Primary Care Together, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. He has contributed more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics including public health systems, research, maternal and child health, health promotion, and chronic disease prevention. Castrucci has been featured in media outlets such as Nation’s Health, Hospitals and Health Networks, Public Health Newswire, the American Journal of Public Health, KevinMD, and the Health Affairs GrantWatch Blog. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political science from North Carolina State University and an MA in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University. Castrucci is pursuing a Doctorate in Public Health Leadership at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

New York City: The Fit City Examples

Karen Lee

Associate Professor, Preventive Medicine, University of Alberta

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Karen Lee joined the Division of Preventive Medicine in the University of Alberta’s Department of Medicine in February 2018. Lee recently returned to Canada from her decade and a half away in the United States, where she undertook work first for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Epidemic Intelligence Service and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention. She worked for nearly nine years in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as deputy to the assistant commissioner of Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, and as the inaugural director of Healthy Built Environments during Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. Her national and international award-winning collaborative work with non-health sectors—such as urban planning, transportation, architecture, housing, affordable housing, education and school construction, facilities management, environmental sustainability and economic development—has produced resources now used by these sectors around the world to improve health and well-being considerations within their practices and policies. Along with New York City’s comprehensive environmental approach to chronic disease prevention and control during the Bloomberg administration, the city experienced increases in life expectancy of 2.2 years with rates of increase exceeding those in the rest of the United States. Longstanding increasing childhood obesity trends were reversed. Her team has also consulted and mentored many cities and organizations around the world in this work. She has acted as a special advisor to multiple World Health Organization regional offices on intersectoral collaboration issues to address the social and environmental determinants of health and to improve health equity. Lee was trained in medicine at the University of Alberta and completed a master’s degree in health science and a residency in public health and preventive medicine at the University of Toronto.

Observatory for Urban Health in Belo Horizonte City: An Innovative and Cross-Sectoral Collaboration in Urban Health

Waleska Teixeira Caiaffa

Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology, Belo Horizonte Observatory for Urban Health, School of Medicine, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

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Waleska Teixeira Caiaffa, originally trained as a pediatrician, is a full professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, School of Medicine, Belo Horizonte City, Brazil. She is the founder and executive committee member of Urban Health Network for Latin America and Caribbean and the SALURBAL project, a five-year multi-country research project in LAC, funded by Wellcome Trust. Since 2015, Caiaffa has been a member of the Advisory Board at United Nations University, International Institute of Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For more than 18 years, she has led the renowned Observatory for Urban Health in Belo Horizonte, spearheading its national and international initiatives on urban health. Focusing on urban inequalities and the social determinants of health, her main work is looking for evidence for action in policies and programs, combining efforts to provide an empirical basis for determining which urban health interventions might work for health inequity. From 2011 to 2014, she was president of the International Society for Urban Health at the New York Academy of Medicine; in 2011, she chaired the 10th International Conference in Urban Health in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She is a consultant for the Brazilian Ministry of Health, and has been a recipient of the research fellowship from the Brazilian National Council of Scientific and Technological Development for more than 20 years. Caiaffa has published in peer-reviewed journals, and serves on a number of institutional boards and international panels where she continues to contribute to the global discourse on urban health and health inequities. She is associate editor of the Journal of Urban Health and Cities & Health. Caiaffa completed her MPH training in international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University– Bloomberg School of Public Health and earned a PhD at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

Rapid Urbanization in China

Brian J. Hall

Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau

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Brian J. Hall is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Global and Community Mental Health Research Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Macau in China, and an associate in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hall is the inaugural APA-IUPsyS Global Mental Health Fellow of the World Health Organization. For over 15 years, he has been involved in intervention and population-level research among vulnerable and at-risk communities globally. Hall is a licensed clinical psychologist, who earned a PhD in clinical psychology at Kent State University and completed his internship as an NIMH T32 predoctoral fellow in traumatic stress at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston Consortium clinical training program. He trained in epidemiology during a two-year NIMH T32 postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hall then accepted a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship with the UJMT consortium and the UNC Institute of Global Health and Infectious Disease, with a placement in China to investigate social networks, HIV, and mental health among migrant communities. His work has been published in more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the areas of stress, trauma, behavioral addiction, and global mental health. He received seven early career awards for his work, three from the American Psychological Association (Divisions 12, 56, 52), and the Chaim and Bela Danieli Young Professional Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He serves or has served as a consultant for the WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, and local government offices as well as nongovernmental organizations in China. Hall is an associate editor for the journal Anxiety, Stress, and Coping, and serves on four other journal editorial boards. He is currently an elected member of the Board of Directors of the ISTSS.

Boston: A Case Study

Russell P. Lopez

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health

Moderated by: Lola Adedokun

Director, Child Well-being Program and African Health Initiative, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

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Lola Adedokun is the director of the Child Well-being Program and director for the African Health Initiative at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Since joining the Foundation in 2007, she has contributed to shaping the strategy and management of the African Health Initiative—an effort established to catalyze significant advances in strengthening health systems. The initiative supports research and implementer partnerships that design, implement, and evaluate large-scale models of care that link implementation research and workforce training directly to the delivery of integrated primary healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2014, she became director of the Child Well-being Program to promote children’s healthy development and protect them from abuse and neglect in the United States. The program has adopted a public health approach that uses a whole family lens as a strategy to prevent and treat child maltreatment. Grants made through this program seek to strengthen collaborative neighborhood strategies, expand the capacity of systems that serve vulnerable children and families, and invest in building a diverse cadre of mid-career leaders committed to improving outcomes for vulnerable and underserved children and families. Prior to her work at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Adedokun worked as an analyst at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she was responsible for the management and analysis of HIV/AIDS surveillance data. Earlier in her career, she served as an analyst at Abt Associates Inc., assisting in the implementation of several federally funded impact evaluations related to HIV/AIDS programming and research-capacity building—both domestically and internationally. Adedokun earned a bachelor’s degree in health policy and sociology from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

PART FOUR: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF CITIES

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Migration

Sabrina Hermosilla

Research Scientist, Global Mental Health Program, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University

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Sabrina Hermosilla, an epidemiologist, is a research scientist with the Global Mental Health Program at Columbia University School of Physician and Surgeons. Her research applies epidemiologic principles and methods to explore child and adolescent mental health and psychosocial outcomes in complex emergency settings. Hermosilla’s current research interests include child and adolescent mental health measurement issues, implementation science in low-resource settings, and social determinants of health. Her applied research portfolio includes collaborations with major international institutions, United Nations agencies, and local organizations. She completed her PhD, MIA, and MPH at Columbia University and holds an MS from the City College of New York.

City Leadership for Health, Equity, and Sustainable Development

Agis D. Tsouros

International Advisor on Health Policy and Strategy, Global Healthy Cities, and Former Director, World Health Organization

Healthy and Safe Spaces to Play and Work

Renée Boynton-Jarrett

Associate Professor, Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine

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Renée Boynton-Jarrett is a pediatrician and social epidemiologist and the founding director of the Vital Village Community Engagement Network. Her work focuses on the role of early-life adversities as life course social determinants of health. She has a specific concentration on psychosocial stress and neuroendocrine and reproductive health outcomes, including obesity and early puberty. She is interested in social ecology and the role of neighborhood attributes in influencing health trajectory. Specifically, she has studied the intersection of community violence, intimate partner violence, and child abuse and neglect and neighborhood characteristics that influence these patterns. Her current work is developing community-based strategies to promote child well-being and reduce child maltreatment using a collective impact approach in three Boston neighborhoods.

Regional Planning for Health

David Siscovick

Senior Research Scientist, The New York Academy of Medicine, and Professor Emeritus, Medicine and Epidemiology, University of Washington

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David Siscovick is a senior research scientist at the New York Academy of Medicine. He is professor emeritus of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Washington, and formerly co-directed the UW Cardiovascular Health Research Unit and Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training Program. Siscovick was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, American College of Physicians Teaching and Research Scholar, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Preventive Cardiology Academic Awardee, and a Donald W. Reynolds Scholar. For more than three decades, he was an academic general internist and clinical epidemiologist with a focus on bridging clinical medicine and public health. Siscovick has a highly successful track record of research related to chronic disease prevention, health disparities, and successful aging, with more than 750 peer-reviewed publications and multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health. His research has focused broadly on the epidemiology and prevention of cardiovascular disease across the lifespan. In 2014, he was listed among the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds by Thomson Reuters. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute on Aging, and is the past chair of the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention. Siscovick is a member of the New York Committee of the Regional Planning Association, and was a member of the RPA Committee on the Fourth Regional Plan for Metropolitan New York, where he collaborated on efforts to integrate health and equity into long-range planning for the tri-state region. He is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene City-wide Hypertension Initiative. Siscovick also is the co-principal investigator of a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute grant assessing the impact of Medicaid Health Homes on the Process and Outcomes of Care for Patients with Diabetes.

Moderated by: Katharine Lusk

Executive Director, Initiative on Cities, Boston University

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Katharine Lusk spearheads new university-wide programs and research, including the Menino Survey of Mayors, student government fellowships and multi-stakeholder conferences, and serves as Senior Personnel to a number of federally funded research grants devoted to smart cities and the urban environment. She serves on the advisory boards of the BU City Planning & Urban Affairs Program, the BU Institute for Sustainable Energy, the BU Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health, the Boston Area Research Initiative, and as a Fellow with the BU Hariri Institute for Computing. Lusk served as a Policy Advisor to the late Boston Mayor Tom Menino, where she led his work to make Boston the first city in the country to achieve pay equity for women. She created the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, a unique collaborative governance partnership, and now serves on the Council as an appointee of Mayor Marty Walsh. An enthusiastic civic entrepreneur, Lusk also launched a capital fund for child care providers, a platform for women small business owners, and the nation’s first mobile City Hall. Prior to entering public service, Lusk worked as a brand strategist and researcher for Fortune 500 companies for ten years. She received a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she was the recipient of the Barbara Jordan Award for Women’s Leadership and the Manuel Carballo Award for her graduate thesis modeling state-run paid family leave for Massachusetts. She earned her BA from Williams College.