University of Michigan News Service – UM News

Funding for Health and Society Scholars Program

ANN ARBOR—A new program at the University of Michigan hopes to encourage researchers to look at public health issues in a much broader way—examining how tax policy or urban sprawl influence health, for example.

The Health and Society Scholars Program will involve faculty from across campus, in traditional public health areas like epidemiology and medicine, as well as broader fields like economics, sociology, history, and urban planning. The goal is to influence policy and train researchers to examine more fully social, behavioral, environmental and biological issues contributing to the health of the population as a whole.

“There’s no one lens that will help us understand the issues or know how to solve them,” said George Kaplan, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and director of the Health and Society Scholars Program. “It’s only by bringing together people from widely diverse backgrounds, many of which are not often thought of as having anything to do with health, that we get the kind of added understanding we’re after.”

Kaplan noted that there is strong interest both at the national and international level for answers to the big questions, such as how policy or politics affect health, but there is also a critical shortage of experts who can provide the answers. The program hopes to address that disconnect.

Faculty members participating in the program as teachers and mentors have received research grants totaling more than $146 million since 1988, and they have written more than 1,000 scientific papers on health and society topics. Faculty will help postdoctoral students develop a broader view of their role in health practice and policy making.

In addition to his appointment at the School of Public Health, Kaplan is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and is director of the Michigan Initiative on Inequalities in Health and the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is funding the project, which is in the planning phase. Kaplan said planning will be completed by October and the first scholars will be enrolled in September 2003. U-M was selected as one of six sites nationally, including Columbia University, Harvard University, University of California at San Francisco and Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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