In Fall 2024, the Department of Health Behavior & Health Education became the Department of Health Behavior & Health Equity, a name change that reflects the department’s increasing focus on health equity issues in research, teaching, and service. This commitment to health equity is reflected in the content of our core and elective courses, the aims of our research projects, and the local, national, and global service in which our students, staff, faculty, and alumni are engaged.
To celebrate our new name, the department is hosting a Health Equity Symposium. This event is free and open to the public.
Friday, September 27, 2024
9:00am to 4:30pm
This in-person event will take in place in Room 1690, SPH 1 building, and individual sessions will be livestreamed. In-person registration closes Wednesday, September 18th.
Watch the Livestream
9:00-10:00am: MORNING KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Celebrating Equity: A Public Health Perspective Through a National Lens
Ella Greene-Moton
President, American Public Health Association
Ms. Greene-Moton has an extensive background in public health advocacy, public health policy, community-based participatory research (CBPR), and programming, spanning the past 40+ years in the City of Flint and surrounding areas. Her areas of expertise include facilitating community/academic/practice partnership building and sustainability; developing, managing, and evaluating community-based projects; and training programs for graduate students, community members, as well as middle and high school students partnering with community-based organizations, schools, and public health agencies. She currently serves as the Community Based Organization Partners Community Ethics Review Board administrator and the executive consultant and co-chair of the Flint/Genesee Partnership, Health in Our Hands project. She also serves as an independent community-academic consultant working with other national academic institutions engaged in community based participatory research with their local communities. Ms. Greene-Moton is the first non-academic professional to serve as President of the American Public Health Association.
10:00-11:15am: Distinguished Health Behavior & Health Equity Alumni Panel
Rashid Njai,MPH alum, PhD program alum
Minority Health and Health Equity Science Team Leader, CDC
Ali Abazeed, MPH program alum
Director, Dearborn Department of Public Health
Brenda Henry, PhD, MPH program alum
Principal, BLH Consulting
Alana LeBron, PhD program alum
Associate Professor of Health, Society & Behavior and Chicano / Latino Studies; University of California-Irvine
11:30AM-12:30Pm: Health Equity Project Showcase
This session will feature three presentations from current Health Behavior & Health Equity faculty members and community partners, who will discuss current or recently completed projects with a health equity focus.
Kristi Gamarel, Associate Professor of Health Behavior & Health Equity (with Laura
Jadwin-Cakmak and Harmony Harris)
Love Her Collective Community-Academic Partnership
Roshanak Mehdipanah, Associate Professor of Health Behavior & Health Equity
Housing Solutions for Health Equity
Amy Schulz
University Diversity & Social Transformation Professor of Health Behavior & Health Equity
Angela G. Reyes, MPH
Executive Director and Founder, Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation
1:15-2:15 pm: AFTERNOON KEYNOTE SPEAKER
A Case for Humanistic Leadership in Health Equity
Jesus Ramirez-Valles, PhD, MPH program alum
Chief, Division of Prevention Science
UCSF School of Medicine
Jesus Ramirez-Valles, PhD, MPH (he/him), is an accomplished scholar, academic, filmmaker and public health leader. He is the Chief of the UCSF Division of Prevention Science and holds the Walter Gray Endowed Chair in HIV/AIDS Science of the AIDS Research Institute. Jesus’s work is rooted in the social and behavioral sciences and focused on health equity and community engagement. His research and advocacy have centered on ethnic and racialized communities, as well as LGBTQI populations here and abroad. He has published two books: Compañeros: Latino Activists in the Face of AIDS and Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology. His work has been funded by both the National Institutes of Health and several foundations. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Health Education and Behavior. Before joining UCSF, Jesus served as Director of the Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University. Prior to that, he chaired the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Public Health.
Jesus serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood Northern California and as Advisor to NIH’s All of Us Research Program
He was born in Mexico and obtained his PhD and MPH degrees from the University of Michigan.
2:15-3:15pm: Lightning Talks
This session will feature ten 5-minute presentations highlighting the health equity work of Health Behavior & Health Equity students, staff, faculty, and community partners.
- Sadé Richardson, Staff, Alumni: 10 Year Partnership in Grenada: Looking Back & Moving Forward
- Gary Harper, Faculty: “All Pull Together” (Harambee): Promoting Health Equity for Gay and Bisexual Young Men in Western Kenya
- Irving Suarez, Student: ICE in the Heartland: Utilizing an Art-Based Curriculum to Disseminate Information Into Middle and High School Classrooms
- Hurley Riley, Staff, Alumni: Trauma-Informed Programs and Practices for Schools (TIPPS): A Multi-Level Framework to Promote Health Equity in Schools
- Ini-Abasi Ubong, Staff, Alumni: Listening to the Voices of Black Transgender Men and Transmasculine People in the Detroit Metro Area
- Justin Heinze, Faculty: Public Health IDEAS: Interdisciplinary Discovery, Engagement + Actions for Society
- Paul Fleming, Faculty: Pilot results from the “Health Equity via Anti-Racist Teaching” online training program
- Mary Janevic, Faculty: Adapting Chronic Pain Self-Management for Older Adults Experiencing Health Inequities
- Mariya Bahrenburg, Staff, Student: Building the Public Health Workforce Pipeline: An Overview of the University of Michigan Future Public Health Leaders Program
- Barbara Israel, Faculty: Capacity building for developing equitable community-academic partnerships: The CBPR Partnership Academy
3:15-4:30pm: Reception and Poster Session
The event will conclude with a catered reception and Poster Session in the Cornely Room (1680) in SPH I.
- Wolfgang Bahr: The CARE in Cities Project: Reducing health inequities with unarmed non-police response programs
- Janae Best: Intersectionality Matters: An Examination of the Role of Sexual Orientation in the Association Between Superwoman Schema and Depressive Symptoms of Black Women at HBCUs
- Kate Brantley: Communities in Context: Engaging residents and services providers to examine housing and mental health inequities across the Greater Detroit area
- Mary C. Byron: Equity in Nature: Practices for Centering Historically Marginalized Communities in Environmental Conservation
- Brittany Carter: Integrating Health Equity into a Translation and Dissemination Plan for the HPTED Study
- Wesley Correll-King: Informing Public Health Policies: A Scoping Review of Empirical Research on Firearms and Firearm Violence Among LGBTQ+ Populations in the United States
- Cassandra Felix: The Role of Experiential Learning (EL) on the Development of Research Literacy Skills during a Research Training Program for High School Students
- Koya Ferrell: How Reflective Interventionist Conversation Analysis Promotes Healthcare Equity: An Example from the Urology HEIRS Project
- Gretta Rempel Fisher: A review of state legislation using cumulative risk or cumulative impact frameworks: Definitions, scope and recommendations
- Juliana Fucinari: The effects of loneliness and sense of belonging on depression scores of LGBTQ+ participants in the Healthy Minds Study, illustrated with conditional indirect effect modeling
- Kaitlyn Gastineau: Temporal and content differences of K-12 technology-facilitated reporting systems by state and implications for equity
- Justin Heinze: Introducing the Prevention Research Collaborative
- Elizabeth Gonzalez: "Community-engaged land revitalization - barriers and facilitators to equitable access to the benefits of vacant land reuse
- Mary Janevic: Acceptability of Podcasts to Enhance Wellness Skills among Older Adults in an Underserved Community
- Love Her Collective: Strengthening Community Responses to Economic Vulnerability: A Microeconomic Intervention for Transgender Women of Color
- Cyrena Mantingou: Returning Citizens’ Outcomes from Peer Reentry Services: A Modified Systematic Review
- Ezekiel Medina: Learning from parents at Pop-Up Safety Town: What do families of young children do and what do they want to know about firearm safety practices?
- Hannah Rice: Health Impact Assessment of the Gordie Howe International Bridge: Environmental Justice, Community Benefits, and Health Equity
- Laney Rupp: Inequities in community violence, lessons learned in an intervention study to prevent dumping
- Elyse Thulin: Racial Disparities in Anonymous Reporting Systems
- Lily Tiefel: Current Concussion Knowledge and Testing Para Athletes at the University of Michigan
- Hailey Tursak: Autism Services and Support Implemented in a Sensible Timeframe (ASSIST) Michigan Families Study
- Gabrielle Young: Structural drivers of health inequities: Lineages of scholarship and key conceptual components