University of California, San Francisco & Berkeley Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars
ALUMNI
(2007-2009) Cohort 5 Scholars
(2006-2008) Cohort 4 Scholars
(2005-2007) Cohort 3 Scholars
(2004-2006) Cohort 2 Scholars
(2003-2005) Cohort 1 Scholars
David H. Chae, ScD
David H. Chae, ScD, is a Robert Wood Johnson Heath and Society Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Francisco site. He will be joining the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University in Fall 2009. Dr. Chae’s research focuses on the health implications of socially oppressive systems, expressed in processes such as discrimination and dimensions of self- and group-identity. Using a socio-psychobiological framework, he examines how racism, structural and interpersonal forms of discrimination, and dimensions of racial/ethnic identity impact health via psychological and biological processes. Dr. Chae is the principal investigator of a study examining psychobiological stress mechanisms involved in cardiovascular health among African American young adult men.
Dr. Chae received his Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Society, Human Development and Health, with a major in Social Epidemiology and interdisciplinary concentration in Women, Gender, and Health. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Chicago where he majored in Psychology; and Master of Arts degree in Psychology from Columbia University, Teachers College. He was also a W.K. Kellogg Fellow in Health Policy, a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Center for Multicultural Mental Health Studies, and a researcher at the University of Washington.
Jenna Nobles, PhD
Jenna Nobles is a social demographer who studies issues of development, migration, and family dynamics. Much of her previous work examines these relationships in resource-constrained settings. Her dissertation research studied the effects of parental labor migration on child development in Mexico, with a particular focus on children’s living arrangements, health status, and educational attainment. In related work, she has examined shifting family formation patterns during periods of economic and social change. As a Health and Society Scholar, Jenna will examine U.S. health issues emerging from a) population composition change on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border and b) temporary migration patterns in the wake of economic downturn and natural disaster. Jenna received her Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA, where she was an affiliate of the Center for Health and Development and the California Center for Population Research. She graduated from Boston College with a B.A. in sociology in 2002.
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(2006-2008) Cohort 4 Scholars
Ryan A. Brown, PhD
Ryan Brown received a PhD in biocultural anthropology from Emory University in 2006. While at Emory, Brown's research explored how Cherokee (American Indian) and White youth in the Appalachian Mountains view and experience their lives, with special attention to violence, substance use, and other risk-taking behaviors. As a Health and Society scholar, Ryan Brown conducted three research projects: (1) Collaborating with Margaret Kemeny, Ryan used an experimental approach to examine emotional and biological responses to social threat. This research found that anger can be an adaptive (or biologically protective) response to social threat in some cases, while shame is associated with detrimental patterns of biological response. (2) Collaborating with Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, Ryan used a survey approach to explore the social and emotional mediators of the "acculturation gradient" in health risk behaviors among U.S. immigrants (lower than expected risky behaviors for first generation Latino and Asian immigrants, but increasing risky behaviors with increasing acculturation). This research found that the perceived chance of shaming or disappointing family or community members appears to decrease involvement in health risk behaviors. (3) Collaborating with Ray Catalano, Ryan investigated the impact of mass political involvement on mortality in Sweden. This research provides prospective evidence of the lifespan-extending effects of female political involvement on female life expectancy. Ryan is now Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, where he is establishing a mobile psychophysiology laboratory as well as a field school for human trafficking research with the United Nations in Bangkok, Thailand.
Belinda Needham, PhD
Belinda Needham is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her research focuses on gender differences in the link between mental and physical health across the life course. She is particularly interested in identifying developmental processes by which gender inequality shapes inequalities in health.
David Rehkopf, ScD
David Rehkopf completed his dissertation at the Harvard School of Public Health in March of 2006 in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health. His dissertation, entitled “The non-linear impacts of income on mortality, biomarkers and growth,” documents the ways in which higher income has different returns to health and human development depending on a household's position in the income distribution.
His research interest is in understanding the differences between permanent income and changes in income in explaining socioeconomic disparities in cardiovascular disease risk factors and in understanding variation in childhood growth, as well as understanding the relative importance of the pathways through which income disparities develop. In addition to using methods to make causal inference from observational data, he is interested in using circumstances where changes to income or resources occur at a population level to understand the associations between household resources and health.
(2005-2007) Cohort 3 Scholars
Sara Johnson, PhD, MPH
Sara Johnson received her PhD in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation looked at how new understandings of adolescent biobehavioral development from fields including neuroscience, neuoroendocrinology, psychology and adolescent medicine, could be integrated in order to design more effective injury and violence prevention programs for youth. Her research interests in the RWJ HSS Program include biological and contextual influences on adolescent decision-making about risk, and the effect of social factors on child development and health-related trajectories.
Candyce Kroenke, ScD, MPH
Candyce Kroenke comes to the Robert Wood Johnson program most recently as an instructor at the
Wizdom Powell Hammond, PhD, MPH
Wizdom Powell Hammond received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan in March 2005. Wizdom also holds a MS degree in Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MPH degree from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She received her BA in Forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Wizdom’s research has largely focused on investigating racially engendered health disparities among African American men. Wizdom received an award from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation to fund her dissertation research, which examined factors associated with African American men’s medical mistrust, utilization of preventive health screening services, and engagement in self-protective health practices. During her graduate training, she also worked with the University of Michigan Prevention Research Center on the Fathers and Sons Evaluation Project, a CDC-funded community-based participatory intervention between nonresidential African American fathers and their pre-adolescent sons. Wizdom is a recipient of both the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship administered by the National Research Council and the American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship funded by SAMHSA. As a health and society scholar, Wizdom plans to investigate the interplay between social constructions of masculinity and African American men’s acquisition of healthcare/social capital across the lifespan and the impact of racial discrimination experienced by African American men in healthcare and social environments on their trust in healthcare organizations and professionals.
June Tester, MD, MPH
June Tester did her undergraduate training in biology at Harvard University and completed medical school at University of California, San Francisco. During medical school, she completed an MPH at UC Berkeley and began to pursue her interest in how the built environment affects the health of urban populations. Interested in traffic calming interventions, she studied the effects of neighborhood speed humps on child pedestrian injury. She completed residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Oakland in June of 2005. Dr. Tester’s research as a Health and Society Scholar focuses on how the built environment relates to injury as well as to physical activity among children, and she has studied the relationship of parental perceptions of environment to children’s walking behaviors. She has been a research collaborator with Team Up for Youth, a non-profit in Oakland, in conducting a longitudinal study of San Francisco parks before and after renovations to their playfields. She also studies the role of the food environment on childhood obesity, and is conducting a study about street vendors and after school snacking in school children.
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Julian Jamison, PhD
Julian Jamison comes to the program from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he was an assistant professor of decision sciences. He earned his PhD in economics from MIT, specializing in game theory: his doctoral work considered the role of information and uncertainty in dynamic strategic interactions among agents. Julian's early work in health economics focused on mathematical models for measurement of the burden of disease. As a Health & Society Scholar, he is pursuing the relationship between health and utility, where the latter may be measured as subjective; predicted; according to revealed preference; or via recent neuroscientific techniques. He is also studying decision-making in charged contexts, such as with newly diagnosed patients; alcohol-impaired young adults; or dieters tempted by chocolate cake. Of particular interest in all of this work are observed differences across individuals and population subgroups. Julian has served as a consultant for NIMH, JPL, Lockheed-Martin, and Bates White, LLC.
Janxin Leu, PhD
Janxin Leu received a joint BA/MA in Psychology from Stanford University, and later served as a research fellow at Peking University in 1997 in Beijing, China. Along with her family, she has been active in addressing poverty in rural China through grass-roots initiatives in literacy and community development (www.esscare.org). She received her Ph.D. in social psychology along with a certificate of training in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in June 2004. At Michigan, she worked with social psychologists, developmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians to examine the influence of cultural models of self and well-being on cognition and emotion in the US, China, and Japan. As an RWJ fellow, she is working to better understand the role of culture and emotion in health, using epidemiologic, biopsychological, and narrative methods. Specifically, she and her colleagues examine 1) how emotional scripts, such as anger, are produced and learned within American immigrant communities, and consequently, 2) how the experience and display of these emotions (e.g., anger) contribute to changing disease patterns, such as the greater prevalence of coronary heart disease among second and third generation immigrants.
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Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH
Douglas Jutte received his BA from Cornell University and his MD from Harvard in 1996. While in medical school he worked in the Dominican Republic and evaluated childhood malnutrition in several rural communities. He studied the interaction of biomarkers for iron deficiency anemia children in Guatemala. After completing his residency at Stanford University, serving as chief resident, Doug joined Stanford's Division of General Pediatrics, where he worked with Mexican immigrants and other minority families. Interest in Latino health and behavioral pediatrics led to research assessing the validity of psychosocial screening tools in Hispanic children. In 2003 Doug completed an MPH in epidemiology at UC Berkeley. His research interests are resilience and vulnerability in children and the biological links through which social-contextual factors contribute to a child's long-term medical, psychosocial and cognitive outcomes. Current projects include work with the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy using the Population Health Data Repository to examine the interactive relationships of biological and social factors present at birth and long-term health and educational outcomes, and a UC Berkeley-based pilot study evaluating SES-related differences in family interaction and parent-child communication on development of the pre-frontal cortex.
Michelle McMurry, MD, PhD
Michelle McMurry was the Health and Social Policy Legislative Assistant to Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat-Connecticut). Michelle received her MD and PhD in molecular immunology from
Amani M. Nuru-Jeter, PhD, MPH
Amani M. Nuru-Jeter completed her PhD in Health Policy and Management, Health and Social Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in May 2003. Her dissertation examined the role of race and residential segregation in the relationship between income inequality and mortality in metropolitan areas in the U.S. Amani has also explored doctor-patient race concordance and its effects on satisfaction with and utilization of health care services. Prior to this, she earned an MPH in Maternal and Child Health from the George Washington University School of Public Health. Amani’s work focuses on structural inequalities, psycho-social and environmental context and its implications for racial inequalities in health. She is currently developing a tool to measure racism and racial discrimination and its influence on reproductive health outcomes. She is also working on the conceptualization of race as a marker for exposure to chronic stress and is examining the influence of psychosocial and contextual factors on racial differences in allostatic load. Her previous roles include Health Policy Coordinator at DC Action for Children and Manager of the State Primary Care Office at the Department of Health in Washington, D.C. Amani currently serves as a Core Member of the Health Disparities Working Group of the National Children's Study and the Measures of Racism Working Group at the CDC.
Article: A methodological note on modeling the effects of race: the case of psychological distress
2009 Presentations
Constance Wang, PhD
Constance Wang is an epidemiologist with interdisciplinary training in biostatistics and in biological, behavioral and decision sciences. She earned her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Texas School of Public Health in 2003. Her overall research interests relate to the social determinants of population health and healthy aging.
Specifically, her research is focused on understanding, from a lifecourse perspective, the social influences on disease causation in populations, with the ultimate goal of pinpointing what actions, in the form of intervention programs and health policies, need to be taken at what age across the lifespan of individuals to prevent disease and to enhance population health and healthy aging. She is engaged in an interdisciplinary research program through her National Institute on Aging-funded Career Development Award (K01) to identify the constellation of multilevel factors that predict multiple-disease vulnerability and resilience in the population. Constance takes an epidemiology-based approach to integrate theories and methodologies from diverse, but complementary disciplines (social and policy sciences, medicine and public health, biology and human development), to account for health and disease over the lifespan of individuals.
The most important aspect of her work is to describe how a multiplicity of biological, physiological, psychosocial, social, and environmental factors act in concert to impair health and/or decrease resilience in populations. In this work, she is developing systematic and simplified ways in which computational methods can be implemented to integrate social and biological complexity in the discovery of underlying preventable causes of vulnerabilities and diseases.
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