Teaching Public Health (Part 1): Promoting Learning

Dr. Christine Arcari is the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Her role is to provide leadership and vision in academic affairs for the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She received her PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an MPH in Community and Family Health from the University of South Florida, College of Public Health. Arcari has an extensive record of teaching, mentoring and promoting student success in public health. She has received numerous teaching awards, including national recognition from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (APTR), the F. Marion Bishop Award for Outstanding Educator of the Year.

Her scholarly activities are focused on education. Recently, she served as Chair for a workgroup as part of the Association for Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Taskforce which produced the report “Institutional Programs, Practices, and Policies in Public Health Pedagogy.” Arcari is also a member of the ASPPH Framing the Future 2030 Transformative Educational Models and Pedagogy expert panel that will seek to identify and promote concrete strategies to strengthen education for public health.

Candice Belanoff, ScD, MPH, is a Maternal and Child Health Epidemiologist with a particular interest in the relationship of social forces and inequities to patterns of population health. She is currently investigating associations between measures of structural racism and the occurrence of preterm birth and other adverse perinatal outcomes. Recent research has also addressed health outcomes related to cesarean delivery; substance use among women of reproductive age; and assisted reproductive technology.

Candice designed and is the founding Director of the Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation and Evaluation (CAPDIE) certificate program, which graduates dozens of newly minted community health practitioners every year. She also teaches several courses at BUSPH, including Assessment and Planning for Health Promotion (SB820), Social Justice and the Health of Populations: Racism and other systems of oppression (MC775) and Advanced Practice and Research Methods for Public Health Equity (MC776). Candice has won multiple teaching awards including the annual Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is known for authentic community engagement and the explicit incorporation of anti-racist, health equity frameworks in her coursework.

Dr. Cozier is an investigator on the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) and the BWHS Sarcoidosis Study at the Slone Epidemiology Center. Her research interests include social and genetic determinants of health in African-American women — specifically, the influence of psychosocial stressors (e.g., racism, neighborhood socioeconomic status), and genetics in the development of cancer, cardiometabolic, and immune-mediated diseases (sarcoidosis, lupus). Additional research interests include oral health, and the role that religiosity/spirituality and the faith community, particularly the black church, plays in health promotion/disease prevention in the Black community.

Sandro Galea is the Margaret C Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health, the Eugene S and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health, and Vice Provost of Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been named an epidemiology innovator by Time, a top voice in healthcare by LinkedIn, and is one of the most cited social scientists in the world. His writing and work are featured regularly in national and global public media. A native of Malta, he has served as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders and has held academic and leadership positions at Boston University, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Alex Pedowitz is a rising fourth-year MD/MPH candidate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2021 with degrees in Biochemistry and Medicine, Health & Society. While at Vanderbilt, she worked as a crisis counselor, which inspired a lasting interest in mental health for young adults; she has continued this interest through her capstone research on youth mental health programming and her advocacy for student wellness. As her class Curriculum Representative, she advocates for student experience, peer mentorship, and equity in medical education. She is dedicated to meeting people in moments of crisis while addressing systemic factors that shape their health––including environmental and structural areas of improvement. While at UM, she co-founded the Miami chapter of Blueprints for Pangaea and expanded it into a broader Student Climate Committee, which emphasizes the intersection of healthcare and sustainability through research, education, and advocacy. She hopes to combine her interests in mental health, climate resilience, and systems-level change and will be applying to Emergency Medicine residency programs this fall.