Research Experience

The most immediate aim of the program is to enhance the ability of scholars to produce research that advances population health. Mentored research is the central component of the overall program. The program sets high expectations, encourages risk and innovation, facilitates independence, and seeks to disseminate scholarship beyond academic outlets and into avenues where substantive change is possible.

Scholars will be linked with potential research mentors as soon as they are accepted into the program. Our core faculty are experienced mentors who are excited about developing the careers of promising new leaders in population health. We encourage scholars to add value to their research careers by choosing mentors from -- and learning the methods, concepts, and "world view" of -- fields outside of the discipline or profession in which they trained. In order to facilitate creative and productive interdisciplinary connections, the Program directors and the steering committee will help broker and sustain mentoring relationships. In addition, we will provide financial and other incentives to encourage substantive, interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars and faculty (e.g. seed research money for scholars and faculty to work together on health and society research projects).

Leadership and Career Development

Leadership is critically important for the acquisition, acceptance, and implementation of new scholarly knowledge, but leadership is hard to define and perhaps even harder to teach and learn. Although many elements of successful leadership may involve deeply seated personal skills, we also believe that leadership can be developed and enhanced. Based on resources at The Wharton School and the Fels Center for Government, the curriculum includes several efforts to develop the leadership abilities of the scholars:

• Readings and seminars
• Meetings with leaders
• Group and individual projects with leadership coaching
• Advanced course work in leadership
• Workshops on career skills (e.g., budgeting, negotiation, etc.)

Closely Affiliated Research Centers

The Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program
The Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Penn offers a two-three year, masters-level interdisciplinary training program, guided by strong mentorship and informed by community-based research to enable physicians to improve health and healthcare in community settings. An overarching goal of the program is for scholars to partner with private and public sector organizations to become a new type of clinical physician investigator, rigorously trained in health services research and related disciplines (clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, economics, health communications) and prepared to effectively translate and implement research into policy and practice which meets the needs of the community and advances health care and the health of the public.

Health Communication Group at the Annenberg School
Robert Hornik and Martin Fishbein lead a group of four faculty, six senior staff and post-docs, and 15 graduate students in perhaps the nation's leading research center in the media, health, and health policy. The center is a unique resource for scholars who wish to design and evaluate the effects of media interventions on health. The Center undertakes research in two broad areas of health communication: (1) studies of the effects of deliberate mass media interventions and (2) studies of the general effects of mass media coverage of health issues on health behavior. The group has also studied health behavior change interventions using modalities besides the mass media. Methods include tightly controlled experiments looking for effects of exposure to particular ads on youth beliefs, field experiments examining behavioral effects of multi-faceted interventions, multi-year nationwide longitudinal sample surveys in the U.S. and in other countries evaluating major health campaigns, and content analyses of media coverage relevant to health behavior matched through time series analyses with evidence of behavior change.

The Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML)
This is a joint venture between Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts and its School of Social Work, in partnership with the City of Philadelphia. The lab is the repository of city information on income, education, crime, health, social services and other measures organized graphically within a high resolution map of the city. The data can support any level of analysis, from the individual's block, neighborhood, or service area. Spatial statistical models using geographic information systems are used to understand the clustering of events and the role of contextual factors that impact on phenomena at different levels. An important side benefit of this work is that the third party relationship with Penn, and the software developed for the lab, have overcome citizen privacy and data security problems and have enabled cooperation and data sharing between city agencies that was previously impossible. Current projects span a wide variety of topics in firearms tracking and public safety, social welfare, children and youth, housing, homelessness, the environment, public education, and public health.

Partners for Child Passenger Safety
Established in 1997, the Partners for Child Passenger Safety program (PCPS) is a collaborative venture of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Penn, and the State Farm Insurance Companies. The central goal of this project is to save children's lives by increasing knowledge about children in motor vehicle crashes. Research work involves three concurrent parts:

• A large and comprehensive collection of data on 20,000 car crashes involving child passengers age 15 and under.
• In-depth studies of 600 selected crashes to determine the movement of children in the vehicle during impact and the presence or absence, and use or misuse, of restraint systems.
• A system to quickly identify significant successes or failures of current and emerging child safety devices and technology.

The Jerry Lee Center of Criminology
The Center's faculty have collaborated with over 30 police agencies around the world, evaluating policies designed to prevent crime, reduce domestic violence, get illegal guns off the streets, prevent police corruption, close down crack houses, and help victims of crime. The Center's quasi experimental approach to the reliability of crime reporting has been used by the Philadelphia Police Commissioner and crime prevention agencies around the country. Research led by Dr. Sherman has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Blair Government in Great Britain as the basis for its $400 million crime prevention program.

Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion
This VA-funded center directed by David Asch aims to understand and eliminate health and health care disparities. The center is structured to provide core support, in the form of statistical, technical, and methodologic expertise, seed funding, space, staffing, and other assistance toward the development of proposals fundable from other organizations. Given the overlap between the goals of this Center and the goals of the Health and Society Scholars Program, and given the overlapping leadership, this resource may become extremely valuable to scholars.

Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
Scholars can learn research-to-action skills by participating in on-going health policy projects, meeting the visiting policy leaders, and informal interactions with individuals working in the private sector.

Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
The CCEB is Penn's home for biostatisticians and non-clinician epidemiologists. The CCEB promotes clinical epidemiology research, both in the community and health care settings; serves as an interdisciplinary resource for clinical research; promotes a population and community perspective throughout clinical research; disseminates research results and in interprets research to policy-makers and the public; and serves as a resource for communities, universities, governments, and other organizations seeking guidance about issues of population medicine, public health, and the epidemiology of disease. Scholars may want to take courses in biostatistics, multi-level modeling, and other methodologies as well as become involved in population-oriented research programs.

Population Studies Center
The Population Studies Center has 46 Faculty Research Associates from eleven departments in seven schools and is considered to be among the leading social-science-based population research and training centers in the world. Scholars can attend workshops, research courses, and guest lectures and find mentorship and research opportunities in the many interdisciplinary research projects on aging, mortality, health and nutrition, effects over the life course, economic and historic demography, and race and ethnicity. Some scholars might participate, for example, in ongoing studies of birth outcomes and infant mortality in different Philadelphia neighborhoods with Jennifer Culhane and Irma Elo.

Other Centers at Penn