Robert Wood Johnson Program Advances Population Health Thinking

Prestige and resources come along with the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation's Health & Society Scholars Program. But the people involved say those things are not the most important benefits.

 

Yes, since the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health was designated a site for the national program in 2002, it has brought in approximately $1.5 million a year to support the post-doctoral scholars and boost population health research on campus and beyond.

 

And certainly, it is great to be among an elite group of institutions - including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and the University of California-San Francisco - selected by the RWJ Foundation to host the program when it began in 2002. This program follows older RWJ human capital programs, such as those sponsoring clinical scholars and health policy scholars.

 

John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert and David Kindig guide the RWJ Scholars Program.

But the program's most important legacy may be the rich research it has spawned to advance interdisciplinary population health thinking: from a critical look at Wisconsin's health insurance for poor people to global positioning-enabled inhalers that are helping health departments create real-time maps of asthma outbreaks to a better understanding of the social and family roots of obesity.

 

Michelle Frisco, PhD, for example, was part of the first cohort of scholars that arrived on campus in fall 2003, and is now an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University.

 

She says her two years in Madison helped her launch a whole new research agenda - a multidisciplinary look at obesity. While in the program, she created partnerships with other researchers that are paying off today in the form of fruitful research alliances.

 

After two years in RWJ, Frisco started as a young Penn State professor with a National Institutes of Health grant in hand and connections to several research partners, including two RWJ scholars and a Wisconsin professor, Gary Sandefur, PhD, dean of Letters and Sciences. Frisco says the program changed her research direction, pushing her toward population health and interdisciplinary research.

 

"Honestly, it was the two years of my career that most shaped who I am as a researcher and an academic," Frisco says. "It shaped my trajectory and my whole idea about what research should be."

 

A Cross-Campus Network at UW-Madison

 

Each January, a cross-section of UW-Madison faculty interview about 16 applicants who have made it through multiple rounds to the finalist pool. Because the applicants come from backgrounds as diverse as anthropology, psychoneuroendocrinology and political science, some 90 professors have been assembled to help select the best candidates.

 

"We've been gratified to find that so many of our campus colleagues we didn't know before have interests in population health," says John Mullahy, PhD, professor of population health sciences at the School of Medicine and Public Health. "We've developed a network that ranges from the School of Business to the Institute for Research on Poverty to the School of Medicine and Public Health."

 

Mullahy co-directs UW's RWJ scholars program along with David Kindig, MD, PhD, professor emeritus of population health sciences, and Stephanie Robert, PhD, professor of social work.

 

You can see the network in action every Monday afternoon, in a conference room on the seventh floor of the WARF building overlooking Lake Mendota. Each week, the six RWJ scholars-three in their first year of the program, three in their second-interact with experts from campus and beyond to enrich their research.

 

Topics of discussion have ranged from caregiver stress to health care reform to how to work with elected officials.

 

On a recent Monday this winter, for instance, Al Gunther, PhD, and Bret Shaw, PhD, of UW's Department of Life Sciences Communications, presented their research on communicating about science, and how indirect messages can affect health behavior.

 

Scholars at the table included:

• Lindsey Leininger, PhD, a health policy researcher specializing in the uninsured
• Katie Dickinson, PhD, an environmental economist studying social networks
• Carmen Mandic, ScD, who studies the impact of caregiving on caregivers
• Vivian Santiago, PhD, a mental health researcher studying pain
• Beth McManus, ScD, who studies the social policies that affect children with disabilities
• Christopher McKelvey, PhD, an economist who is studying the timing of adolescent growth in determining adult health outcomes such as obesity and diabetes

Kindig says the seminars are designed to give "a broad understanding of population health issues."

 

"We have a breathtaking range of expertise at this table each week," Kindig says. "It creates an amazingly rich discussion. It's been fun for us because we get to meet all these people, and help create connections between them."

 

Mullahy says the seminars, and the entire program, are designed to create dialog about population health between people from very different backgrounds.

 

"We get biomolecular chemists to understand how anthropologists talk, and then we introduce them to economists," Mullahy says.

 

Funding for Population Health Research

 

Not only does the Health & Society Scholars program support scholars in residence, it also provides generous funding to grow population health research and teaching on the UW-Madison campus and beyond, in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.

 

Examples of recent interdisciplinary projects supported by these funds include a partnership between the university and Madison Dane County Public Health to investigate why the black-white infant mortality gap has been eliminated in Dane County, and a working group that gathers UW researchers interested in improving health in partnership with Madison low-income neighborhoods.

 

"We're excited to seed population health research not only within the university, but also by bringing together the university with community partners to improve population health," says Robert.

 

The program also provides grants to incorporate a population health perspective into both courses and dissertation projects in other departments and schools.

 

"Healthy city metrics" were added to one soil science class, for example, and one dissertation project included funding for research on indoor air pollution in China.

 

And each spring, dissertating students, their advisors and faculty funded by course development grants gather for a symposium featuring their work.

 

"The symposium is in the spirit of going beyond the six scholars to have an impact on the campus and the whole state of Wisconsin," Kindig says.

 

By Susan Lampert Smith

This article appears in the winter 2010 issue of Quarterly

Date Published: 02/16/2010