Journal Club: Implementation Science

Date/Time
Date(s) - Tuesday, March 28th, 2017
8:30 am - 9:45 am


T32 Seminar
Speakers: Mary Northridge, PhD, MPH and Sara Metcalf, PhD, MBA

Mary Evelyn Northridge, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Health Promotion at the New York University College of Dentistry and an Associated Professor at the New York University College of Global Public Health. She also holds a part-time appointment as a Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences (in Dental Medicine) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the College of Dental Medicine and an adjunct appointment as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University at Buffalo. Professor Northridge currently serves as the inaugural Editor Emerita of the Journal of the Academy of Distinguished Educators and the inaugural Editor Emerita of the American Journal of Public Health. She has enduring interests in social and environmental determinants of health, including oral health, and a current focus in the utility of implementation science and systems science to promote health equity. She is currently funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the US National Institutes of Health on a collaborative R01 among researchers and practitioners at the University at Buffalo, Columbia University, and New York University (Lead PI: Northridge), as well as several local participatory projects related to systems science, implementation science, and oral public health. Professor Northridge earned a BA in chemistry with a specialty in biochemistry at the University of Virginia, an MPH in environmental health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey/Rutgers University, and a PhD in epidemiology at Columbia University. Upon the completion of a post-doctoral fellowship in cancer epidemiology at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, NJ, Professor Northridge continued her academic career at the Harlem Health Promotion Center of Columbia University, where her research and practice projects addressed the elimination of social disparities in health through community-based participatory research for more than two decades. Professor Northridge is the author of over 200 scientific papers and the co-editor of two volumes.

 

Sara Susanne Metcalf, PhD, MBA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo (UB) of the State University of New York. Professor Metcalf earned a BS in biochemistry and a BS in chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, an MS in chemical engineering and an MBA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an urban geographer who practices systems modeling using system dynamics and agent-based models, Dr. Metcalf has experience building simulation models involving social and geographic influences on health care accessibility, diffusion of care-seeking behaviors, and health outcomes. Much of her modeling practice involves a participatory modeling approach that helps to balance convergence and divergence of perspectives in collaborative research contexts. Using insights from these group activities as well as qualitative and quantitative data, Dr. Metcalf and her systems science modeling team have developed a rich portfolio of simulation models, causal maps expressing shared dynamic hypotheses, and statistical models exploring geographic and other influences on health outcomes. The models in this portfolio are used for exploring social dimensions of oral health and care-seeking behaviors. This line of systems science research benefits from innovations in simulation software that facilitate multi-method and hybrid modeling of discrete, spatially-embedded agents alongside, within, or encapsulating stocks of continuously changing accumulations at various scales.

 

Participants are asked to read the following two articles for discussion prior to the seminar:

Mary E. Northridge and Sara S. Metcalf, “Enhancing implementation science by applying best principles of systems science” (Health Research Policy & Systems, 2016)

Sara S. Metcalf & Mary E. Northridge, “Engaging in Systems Science to Promote Health Equity” (SAGE Research Methods Cases, 2017)