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PhD Faculty

Students in the PhD in Public Health Sciences program have the opportunity to work with faculty participating in locally, nationally, and globally recognized research and studies on both the Danforth and Medical School campuses. Their areas of interest range from data analysis to community outreach to AI modeling for positive health outcomes. Learn more about our faculty community and how you can be a part of building a better present and future.

Browse Our PhD Faculty

Filter: Health Equity

Ellis Ballard

Ellis Ballard

Assistant Professor of Practice

  • 314-935-3072
  • eballard@wustl.edu

​Ellis Ballard’s research and teaching focus on advancing participatory approaches to system dynamics modeling with communities to advance health access and social justice. He is director of the Brown School’s Social System Design Lab in which role, he innovates group model building practice methods in cross-cultural contexts, trains future cohorts of social work and public health practitioners to apply system dynamics modeling in their work, and cultivates the growing global community of community based system dynamics practitioners.
Derek Brown

Derek Brown

Associate Professor

  • 314-935-8651
  • dereksbrown@wustl.edu

Derek Brown’s research focuses on costs, access to care, quality, and disparities among Medicaid populations—including physician payment, housing instability, and child maltreatment. He also uses discrete choice experiments to analyze preferences for health care and outcomes, such as screening and vaccination. His goal with this work is to improve valuation of health outcomes and policies and to promote better economic evaluation of public health policies.
Kia-L.-Davis

Kia L. Davis

Assistant Professor of Surgery

  • 314-747-8069
  • daviskl@wustl.edu

Dr. Davis is an applied social epidemiologist. Broadly, she is interested in reducing cancer health disparities by informing organizational and policy change. Her research program will focus on the relationships between socioeconomic status, stress, and cancer risk factors in underserved communities with an eye towards understanding stress as a potential mediating pathway in the relationship between socioeconomic status and cancer risk factors; improving measurement of socioenvironmental stressors in diverse populations and using methods that allow for a more comprehensive measurement of stressors that one may encounter; and developing scalable interventions to reduce the burden of cancer risk in communities of color.
Geng

Elvin Geng

Professor of Medicine

  • 314-454-8354
  • elvin.geng@wustl.edu

Elvin H. Geng, MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine and Director of the Center for Dissemination and Implementation at the Institute for Public Heath, both at Washington University in St. Louis. Using the lens of implementation science, Dr. Geng conducts research to advance the use of evidence-based interventions in the public health response to HIV and COVID-19 as well as increasingly for non-communicable diseases as well. He has worked closely with service-delivery organizations in Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, as well as in the US.
Jeremy Goldbach

Jeremy Goldbach

Masters & Johnson Distinguished Professor in Sexual Health and Education

  • 832-244-5437
  • jgoldbach@wustl.edu

Jeremy Goldbach is the Masters & Johnson Distinguished Professor in Sexual Health and Education. His work is primarily focused on measuring, understanding and intervening upon experiences of minority stress and discrimination among LGBTQ+ children and adolescents. Goldbach's work has been continuously funded since 2012 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Department of Defense (DOD) and through foundations.
Jenine Harris

Jenine Harris

Professor

  • 314-935-3522
  • harrisj@wustl.edu

Jenine Harris earned her doctorate in public health studies and biostatistics from Saint Louis University School of Public Health in 2008 and currently teaches biostatistics courses in the Brown School public health program. Her recent research interests focus on increasing diversity in data science and improving the quality of research in public health by using reproducible research practices throughout the research process. Harris’ award-winning 2020 book, “Statistics with R: Solving Problems Using Real-World Data,” is an introductory statistics textbook published by Sage. The book combines statistical concepts with R coding and includes representation of women throughout as both characters and as authors of resources.