Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program was designed to build the field of population health by training scholars to investigate the connections among biological, behavioral, environmental, economic, and social determinants of health; and develop, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge and interventions based upon integration of these determinants.The primary goal of the University of Michigan Health and Society Scholar program is to provide training and mentoring in population health and its determinants to a group of Scholars from a diverse set of disciplinary fields in order to promote novel interdisciplinary approaches to the understanding and solution of population health problems. A second major goal is to disseminate this multilevel and interdisciplinary approach to population health throughout the University as a whole, in order to promote new research and collaborations in this area, with a view to enhancing the quantity and quality of interdisciplinary population health research. The program emphasizes the importance of linking a multi-level array of causal factors in order to understand and improve population health and eliminate health inequalities. The program brings together faculty from multiple disciplines, including Epidemiology, Sociology, Health Behavior and Health Education, Medicine, Genetics, History, Public Policy, Social Work, Health Management and Policy, Neurosciences, Biostatistics, Economics, Urban Planning, Political Science, Demography, and Ecology in order to create an interdisciplinary environment in which scholars can gain depth, breadth and a wide set of research opportunities in a broad set of issues relevant to population health. Scholar training/mentoring will be achieved through a combination of structured activities (including participation in a specially designed course and structured meetings and seminars) and personalized mentoring. The promotion of population health throughout the University will be accomplished through curricular activities, an invited speakers' research seminar series, and a small grant program aimed at promoting novel interdisciplinary approaches to population health research. Through these activities the program will impact the career trajectories of individual Scholars, the quantity and quality of interdisciplinary research performed at the University, and the development of the field of population health more generally.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $1,519,648.00

Awarded on: 7/6/2010

Time frame: 9/1/2010 - 8/31/2013

Grant Number: 67956