Dr. Dushanka Kleinman and Cindy Brach were recently featured on the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice (JPHMP) Direct Talk podcast to chat about their article, Updating Health Literacy for Healthy People 2030, published ahead of print in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.

Congratulations to Dr. David Andrews for receiving a 2021 Graduate Mentor of the Year Award from the Graduate School. Recipients of this award are selected based on student nominations.  As outlined on The Graduate School website, "The Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award serves the dual purposes of recognizing outstanding mentoring provided by individual faculty and of reminding the university community of the importance of mentoring to graduate studies."

Center director Dr. Cynthia Baur co-moderated a panel on health misinformation as part of the Public Health at Maryland series.

Deputy Director for Clinical Training and Intervention, Dr. Elizabeth Aparicio (she/her), is an integral member of the University of Maryland Prevention Research Center (UMD-PRC). As a community-engaged, clinically trained public health social work researcher and scholar, Dr. Aparicio specializes in addressing the mental, sexual and reproductive health needs of youth in and formerly in foster care and youth experiencing homelessness. She brings the important lenses of trauma-informed care and the reproductive justice framework to inform and test mental health and sexual and reproductive health interventions for trauma-affected and marginalized children, youth and families.

This year has been a trying one for us all. From having an infectious disease thrown at us, to grappling with numerous sociopolitical unrests that have shaken this country to vast proportions, needless to say, many of us have wondered if this was indeed “the end of days.”

When it comes to health officials and experts evaluating environmental health risks among populations, what has been the norm isn’t enough, and a shift is needed to better protect children and other vulnerable groups, according to Devon Payne-Sturges, an assistant professor of Applied Environmental Health in the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

Over 24 hours on Wednesday, March 3, 2021, the University of Maryland School of Public Health community came together virtually to support our research initiatives, scholarships and educational programs. 278 donors—alumni, friends, faculty, staff and students—gave a total of $220,724, an increase of more than 137 percent from the previous year. That placed the School of Public Health at #2 on the leaderboard after Athletics for most funds raised during Giving Day.

Dr. Jie Chen, a professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, received $2.3 million in funding from the NIH-National Institute on Aging for her R01 project focused on improving care coordination practices for racial and ethnic minorities who are at high risk for or have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.

Dr. Quynh Nguyen, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, has received a $3.3 million RO1 grant from the National Institutes of Health for the project Risk and Strength: Determining the Impact of Area-Level Racial Bias and Protective Factors on Birth Outcomes.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Aparicio was selected as a 2021 Society for Social Work and Research Fellow and inducted on Jan. 21, 2021, during the SSWR 2021 virtual conference.