New Associate Dean of Public Health
Professor Rodrigo Reis is taking on the role of Associate Dean for Public Health at the Brown School as of July 1, 2020.
Rodrigo is an exceptionally talented professor, who is deeply committed to student development. He is widely respected in the field for his research on built and community environment and public health, with a focus on promoting physical activity through active transportation and community interventions.
His projects have a global reach, evidenced by recent work on healthy aging and urban living in Brazil. He is the chair of our Urban Design specialization, and his work with the Brown School’s Prevention Research Center includes the Developing Livable Cities project, a transdisciplinary endeavor that seeks to provide guidance on building socially inclusive, affordable, healthy and safe cities using evidence-based research.
Rodrigo succeeds Associate Professor Lora Iannotti, who will be taking a sabbatical to concentrate on her research and a new R01-level NIH grant to study nutrition and parenting interventions in Haiti. As founder of the E3 Nutrition Lab, she leads teams in Haiti, Ecuador and East Africa focusing on reducing stunted growth and development in children. With Lora’s commitment and leadership over the past several years, our program of Public Health has grown enrollment and faculty, deepened its transdisciplinary focus, and debuted in the U.S. News and World Report ranking at No. 17– the highest ranking for a school of public health, among a field of schools.
“We are grateful to Lora for her incredible leadership, and we welcome Rodrigo’s talents and energy as he assumes this new role. He is an exceptionally talented professor, who is deeply committed to student development,” said Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School.
New Director of Public Health Sciences Doctoral Program
Associate Professor Patrick Fowler will assume the directorship of the School’s Public Health Sciences Doctoral Program. Patrick is trained in child clinical-community psychology and uses innovative methods that rigorously investigate policies and programs intended to promote housing and family stability.
His work applies a complex systems perspective to inform developmentally and culturally tailored responses to family and youth homelessness.
Patrick’s federally funded research has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He succeeds Professor Doug Luke, who has served as the inaugural director of the program and who will be on sabbatical next year. Doug is a leading researcher in areas of public health policy, systems science and tobacco control. He serves as director for the Center for Public Health Systems Science at the Brown School (CPHSS), and recently helped to establish the Systems Science for Social Impact Summer training institute at the Brown School, with the goal of training the next generation of scholars in methods most useful for enhancing the social impact of health and social science research.
Said Dean McKay: “We are grateful for Doug’s work to grow our program and his mentorship of our doctoral students, as we also look forward to the talents that Patrick will bring to the PhD program.”