News from the School of Public Health

This semester, Dr. Kathleen (Kate) McPhaul will leverage her expertise and experience protecting workers to teach the School of Public Health's first undergraduate course on occupational health in six years. The class, which is open to Public Health Science majors, introduces students to the field of occupational health and safety and emphasizes that workers' health should be considered in all public health practices and policies.

A team of environmental policy advocates, community members and public health scientists, including Rianna Murray, an assistant research professor and Suhana Chattopadhyay, a doctoral student both with the Maryland Institute of Applied Environmental Health, partnered on a project to assess and safeguard drinking water for residents of Maryland's Lower Eastern Shore who rely on private wells.

The science is clear: transgender and gender diverse youth who have access to gender affirming care, particularly in schools, have better mental health and academic outcomes.

Family Science PhD candidate and UMD-PRC Investigator Natasha D. Williams (she/her) was recently selected for a dissertation award through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars program. Her dissertation, titled: Mental health among Black lesbian, gay, and bisexual people: Examining patterns of risk, treatment utilization, and mental health management strategies will use quantitative analyses of population-level data and interview-based grounded theory methods to elucidate the mental health challenges Black LGB adults face and the ways in which they manage their mental health.  

A $1.75 million gift from Meta (formerly Facebook) to the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health

In a first-of-its-kind study comparing hundreds of millions of social media posts about online health topics, a team of researchers from GWU, JHU and UMD, found that posts about COVID-19 were less likely to contain misinformation than posts about other health topics. The researchers found that health misinformation was already widespread before the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all types of information about COVID-19 — including misinformation — were popular between March and May 2020, posts about COVID-19 were more likely to come from governments and academic institutions. In many cases, these posts were more likely to go viral than posts from sources that routinely spread misinformation