News from the School of Public Health

The School of Public Health would like to recognize and welcome the following faculty and staff to our community. Some are already part of our community and are being recognized for new roles/titles, while others are joining us this academic year. Welcome and congratulations to all!

The Center for Health Literacy is asking African American and Hispanic adults to test a smartphone health app for personalized health information.

The app can help find information to prevent or manage common health conditions.

Here's how to participate:

• OWN an ANDROID phone
• Willing to download the app
• Use the app at least 15 minutes a week
• Attend 1 virtual orientation session

Participants will get:

Community Health Workers or CHWs help people with their everyday health questions and concerns, and last fall, five students at UMD’s iSchool (College of Information Studies) Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction program learned how CHWs hope to use technology to help their clients with health literacy and other health barriers. They interviewed CHWs in southern Maryland and found that CHWs encounter multiple workflow problems.

The University of Maryland School of Public Health is proud to award its highest honor, the Distinguished Terrapin Award, to four outstanding members of the SPH community. Each honoree was selected for their professional and philanthropic contributions as well as for their service to the school and/or advancement of one of the dean’s strategic priorities.

A public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the digital divide more visible, though the researchers' analysis was done long before the pandemic. Working adults and children haven't been able to easily shift to a virtual environment during the pandemic, as they don't have the laptops, smartphones, networked printers, broadband and wifi connections to make the shift.

Before coming to the Center for Health Literacy, Érick Tássio worked as a dentist in Paraíba, Brazil. The visiting doctoral student decided to work at the Center for its dedicated mission on advancing health literacy and its contributions to oral health research. “I selected the Center because it allowed me to share knowledge and gain experience with well-known researchers in the health literacy field as Dr. Alice Horowitz and Dr. Cynthia Baur,” he said.