Past, Present, Future
“The fact that this scholars program is a joint effort between UCSF and Berkeley adds a richer element to my training, because while UCSF is a traditional health sciences campus and has all the benefits of biomedical sciences, the Berkeley campus adds another element, facilitating a truly interdisciplinary environment with public health, sociology, demography, psychology, and public policy all on the same campus,” she says. “That has made my experience here rich and diverse and will allow me to contribute more to the field of population health in the long run.” Though it was not her original goal, she now says that her future is in academia. “I intended to go back out into the field and do local health policy work and grassroots health advocacy, because that’s where my passion was,” she says, “and I still have a passion for that. But at the same time, I’ve learned through my doctoral program the importance of academic research and how that research helps to inform policies that affect populations and communities of people.” Ideally, she hopes to have the best of both worlds—to engage in academic research and use her skills working in communities. “I was interested in this program because it reflects a truly multidisciplinary effort at all levels—the program leadership at the national level, the directors at each program site, as well as the scholars,” says Constance Wang, Ph.D. Wang earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology with an interdisciplinary background in biometry, biological, and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. She is interested in improving the ways in which health researchers study multilevel risk factors and relate them to distributions
“I hope to come up with a more causally consistent model, one that incorporates a cumulative life course approach, in how we study causation of disease in populations.” of diseases in the population, with the primary aim of prevention. “So accordingly, my efforts have been devoted to applying and extending novel statistical methods for modeling high dimensional data to characterize complex populationlevel factors, such as population-level health status,” she says. “I hope to come up with a more causally consistent model, one that incorporates a cumulative life course approach, in how we study causation of disease in populations.” Currently, under the guidance of Professors Len Syme and Bill Satariano and collaborating with faculty at the School, Wang is characterizing cohort aging profiles and studying the determinants of typical aging profiles, using data from the Study of Physical Performance and Age-Related Changes in Sonomans, a community-based longitudinal study of the epidemiology of aging, health, and functioning. First-Year Fellows Julian Jamison, Ph.D., has been an assis-
tant professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He received an M.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jamison is interested in game theory and the formal modeling of interactions between agents; choices over time; experimental economics; and measurement of health outcomes.
“How do people with different health outcomes make decisions?” asks Jamison. To find answers, he wants to conduct experimental games. “To an economist, that means you get a bunch of subjects in a laboratory and set up an artificial game of some sort. You see what they do, you see how it accords with the theoretical prediction. If not, why does it differ?” Jamison would like to involve subjects with various clinical conditions, such as brain lesions, Alzheimer’s disease, and clinical depression, and compare their behaviors to learn about their decision-making processes.
“What really attracted me to this program was this sense of it being a new field.” Jamison has also worked in the area of measuring health outcomes in order to facilitate costeffectiveness analyses. “Measuring the burden of disease is a big issue,” he says. “Both death and disability need to be divided up to determine where we put our resources. For instance, which is worse: one death from tuberculosis or two cases of blindness from polio? It’s unpleasant to think about, but unfortunately resources are limited and policy makers must decide how to spend. The measuring is very difficult, in terms of how you calculate both death and disability.” As a Health and Society scholar, Jamison plans to continue delving into these issues. “What really attracted me to this program was this sense of it being a new field,” says Jamison. “There are still people working on trying to figure out the right questions,
Public Health
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