Brown School › 2020 › Page 6

To help address the international social, economic and public health ramifications of the outbreak, the McDonnell International Scholars Academy recently awarded $250,000 in seed grants to kick-start research projects led by Washington University faculty members and their international collaborators.

Three Brown School faculty members were among the awardees: Professor Rodrigo Reis, Assistant Professor Deborah Salvo, and Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor.

The call for proposals was met with a strong response: 34 teams from six of the university’s schools — with collaborators from 23 international partner institutions — presented projects for consideration. Eleven ultimately were chosen and received awards of up to $50,000. The projects will explore ways to address the global pandemic, but also help further solidify relationships forged between researchers at Washington University and their colleagues around the world.

Reis and Salvo will collaborate with Guillermo Rosas, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis, to investigate the interaction of political attitudes and public health in the COVID-19 era in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico.

Together the trio will lead an international, interdisciplinary team of epidemiologists and social scientists in the United States and Latin America.

Grinstein-Weiss’ project will compare the immediate and long-term economic impacts of COVID-19 on household welfare in Israel and the United States. This dovetails with her research at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, where she serves as inaugural director.

The funded teams now will get to work tackling far-reaching COVID-19-related issues. In addition to the projects led by Brown School faculty, projects will focus on the pandemic’s impact on the retirement process in the United States, South Korea and Australia; HIV care in Ghana, Brazil and the United States; and intimate partner violence in St. Louis, Uganda and Chile. The teams expect to gain more insight into these problems by studying the phenomenon in multiple countries and by drawing on top experts from around the world.

“COVID 19 has been one of the most disruptive forces the world has experienced in decades,” said Kurt Dirks, vice chancellor for international affairs. “Our faculty were eager to tackle the multitude of problems, in collaboration with experts from across the globe, but needed some immediate resources to get started. Thanks to the generosity and foresight of Bethany and Bob Millard, the McDonnell Academy was able to provide the support needed to begin this very important work. The research is expected to yield insights to address the current problems.”

The Millards served as chairs of the Parents Council, Washington University’s undergraduate parent leadership group, this past academic year.

Louis Damani Jones, an incoming student at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed to the board of directors of Catholic Charities of St. Louis. A research assistant with the Center for Social Development, Jones works within the center’s Financial Capability and Asset Building Initiative.

As a 2020 Gephardt Fellow, he also will serve on the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement’s Engage Democracy team.

Established in 1912 to serve the 11 counties of the St. Louis Archdiocese, Catholic Charities of St. Louis is a federation of eight agencies assisting people in need, especially those who are poor and vulnerable; working to improve social conditions for all; and calling members of the church and community to do the same.

A new online program brings together Brown School experts in public health, social work and public policy to help health and social service professionals respond to and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Foundations of Pandemic Preparedness & Response is a five-part, 20-hour program that provides a self-paced, online curriculum and toolkit designed to build basic understanding and skills in epidemiology, surveillance and response, communication, mitigation and recovery, and public health and policy.

“Our goal is to provide professionals with the best possible evidence-based responses to the pandemic,” said Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. She noted that Brown School faculty from a wide range of disciplines curated credible, open-source resources for participants from diverse sites that included trusted government sources, NGO websites, peer-reviewed papers and videos.

“We wanted to create a scaled-down set of information sources so participants don’t have to cull through everything that’s available,” McKay said. “We want them to share these resources.”

The online course, part of the school’s Open Classroom initiative, includes lectures, quizzes, assignments and self study. The five modules can be taken individually or as a package that leads to successful participants receiving a certificate of completion. 

Participants who complete the full program will be able to:

Enrollment in the full program costs $100. Participants may register for modules individually at a cost of $25 each. For Brown School stakeholders, such as students, alumni, faculty or field instructors, the cost is $60 for the full program and $15 per module.

The Brown School offers accredited programs in social work and public health and is an approved provider of social work CEUs in Missouri and Illinois; this program is eligible for self-study units. Mental health license holders from other disciplines and states should consult their licensing body about our program’s eligibility for license renewal.

Learn more and register for any or all of the modules. 

Two recent Brown School graduates were recently selected for a highly competitive Global Health Fellowship, and the good news of their awards was amplified when they learned later they’d both be working in Nairobi, Kenya.

Christina Moore, MPH ’18, and Mackenzie Robinson, MPH ’19 received the fellowships, offered by the Public Health Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They had known each other from the Brown School, but didn’t realize that they had both been selected for the opportunity in Nairobi, Kenya, until they were told by Angela Hobson, assistant dean for public health.

“It’s a great thing, a crazy thing,” said Robinson, who will be serving as a Strategic Information Fellow with the Health Systems & Evaluation Branch at CDC/DGHT (Department of Global HIV and TB) Kenya, working on HIV testing. 

“It will be so nice to have someone else there that I know,” agreed Moore, who will be working on HIV epidemiology with the CDC’s Monitoring and Evaluation team in Kenya. 

The Global Health Fellowships are for a year, but renewable up to three years.  The wildcard right now is the pandemic, which has stalled the relocation of Robinson and Moore to Kenya.  They will begin two weeks of virtual training in September and in the meantime will be awaiting updates.

 “It’s definitely a unique situation,” Robinson said. “It’s proven just how important public health is and why training needs to continue.”

Moore received her master’s at the Brown School after completing her nursing degree.

 “I came to the Brown School for its strength in global health as well for the opportunities to pursue interests in health equity and health disparities,” she said. She completed her practicum in global health at a rural district hospital in Shirati, Tanzania, working in the HIV clinic and then going into the community to follow up on patients.  After graduating with her MPH, she was working as a research coordinator at the School of Medicine. She applied for the fellowship because she wanted to return to global public health. 

Her upcoming fellowship work in Nairobi will be analyzing data for HIV testing and figuring epidemiological calculations to measure improvements, population reach, and sudden infection increases in certain populations. 

Before coming to the Brown School, Robinson spent four years in East Africa, where she was a coordinator for various health and education projects with an international non-profit, including a maternal and newborn health project in Shinyanga, Tanzania. Robinson’s specializations at the Brown School were global health and epidemiology/biostatistics, and she completed her practicum at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia. 

“I looked at quite a few schools, but the Brown School offered a lot more one-on-one attention and mentorship, as well as the strong roots in health equity work, which is often ignored in a lot of public health programs. That really attracted me.” While at the Brown School, she was a research fellow with the Prevention Research Center, which she said rounded out her skills with training in dissemination and implementation.

In Kenya, She will be working on HIV “recency testing,” with the TRACE initiative, a way to detect HIV earlier than what most other tests allow. Diagnosing HIV earlier enables identification at the most infectious stage of the virus, when contract tracing is most important. As testing is scaled up in more countries in East Africa, Robinson will be tracking the testing and conducting surveys to develop more efficient data management and analysis, and to guide regional strategic planning. 

​Jason Purnell, associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named vice president of community health improvement at BJC HealthCare.

Purnell will be responsible for the development, implementation and evaluation of BJC’s community health programs to ensure that they are responsive to the community’s needs. He also will oversee BJC’s connections with community-based programs that offer preventative care for chronic conditions.

He will continue to be a member of the Brown School faculty.

Purnell’s research focuses on how socioeconomic and sociocultural factors influence health behaviors and health outcomes and on mobilizing community action to address the social determinants of health. He currently leads Health Equity Works, the new name and expanded mission of the Brown School initiative previously referred to as “For the Sake of All.”

Cindy Lynn Norman, business office operations supervisor at the Brown School, died in her sleep Wednesday, July 15, 2020. She was 50.

Norman worked at Washington University in St. Louis for 26 years, 19 of those at the Brown School.

Her first role at the university began in 1994, when she worked in accounting in the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine.

“Those of us who worked with her will remember her smile, kindness and positive attitude,” said Mary McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. “Cindy will be greatly missed, and we are so grateful for all of her contributions to our school.”

Norman’s daughter, Brittany Declue, is an accounting assistant in biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering.

Norman is also survived by her mother, Sharon Norman; son, Alexander Swyers; grandchildren Chloe, Elijah and Khari DeClue; brother Delmar “Rusty” Norman; and sister Debbie (Bennett) Howe.

A visitation and funeral were held July 19 in St. Louis. Donations in Norman’s memory may be made to the Animal Protective Association adoption center of Missouri.

To read more about her life, visit the family’s obituary online.