News from the School of Public Health

On a Friday morning, Kristen Arant addressed the 20 public health students gathered around her: “You’re going to have a musical experience today.”

With that, Arant led Dr. Stephen Thomas’ “Fearless Ideas” class in an hour-long drum circle featuring a variety of West African drums, other percussion instruments and the students’ voices.

A team of UMD researchers is developing a new mobile app to help people without regular access to health care cut through the thousands of fitness, nutrition, brain health and other offerings by providing a sort of one-stop wellness shop.

Assistant Professor Devon Payne-Sturges has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) K01 Career Development Award for a project focused on how combined exposure to environmental and social stressors affects child neurological development. The three-year grant from the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences totals more than $400,000.

Throughout the School of Public Health’s first 10 years, faculty and students have actively engaged in research, service and education activities aimed at improving health across the globe and partnering with communities to accomplish these goals.

A group of six University of Maryland students, accompanied by Behavioral and Community Health Research Professor Dina Borzekowski and UMD affiliate and master educator Tina Lipscomb, traveled to Sierra Leone in June to continue the work that the UMD Public Health Without Borders group began back in 2014. The ten-day trip was the fourth visit of UMD students to Calaba Town, a community on the Western coast near the country’s capital of Freetown.

The Spring 2018 SPH faculty and staff assembly included plenty of great news about school and department-level accomplishments, and laughter and good cheer during the faculty and staff awards.

Dean Boris Lushniak spoke warmly about this being the culmination of the SPH ten-year anniversary celebration, highlighting the various celebrations that happened over the course of the academic year. He noted that the SPH commencement ceremony, happening this Saturday, May 19th, will mark the end of our anniversary year and the start of our second decade.