HBS Awards and Accomplishments: August 2020

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HBS Awards and Accomplishments

A monthly series featuring ten awards and accomplishments across the Department of Health, Behavior & Society.

  1. On August 31, HBS officially welcomed 27 new master’s and doctoral students to this year’s Virtual Plus Campus for the first day of classes.
  2. Melissa Davey-Rothwell, PhD, and Amy Knowlton, ScD, collaborated to launch the HBS Café, a new, virtual weekly event series to foster informal opportunities for members of the HBS community to connect.
  3. HBS faculty members, Andrea Gielen, ScD, and Ju Park, PhD, were elected to the HBS Executive Committee. Each will serve a two-year term.
  4. HBS postdoctoral fellow, Rachel Bleiweiss-Sande, PhD, and faculty member, Sara Benjamin Neelon, PhD, received a Cross Border Collaboration Award from Fogarty International Center, through CFDR Global. They plan to evaluate the food environments in U.S.-Mexico border towns from a healthy eating and community food security perspective.
  5. The “Waking up to Climate Change: Cool Roofs, Sleep, and Health in Baltimore City” research project, which aims to evaluate cool roofs as a solution to minimize the urban heat island effect, received $1 million in SCIBAR funding. HBS faculty members, Sara Benjamin-Neelon, PhD, and Susan Sherman, PhD, are co-investigators on the project. Kirsten Koehler, PhD, and Adam Spira, PhD, are the primary investigators.
  6. HBS doctoral student, Naomi Greene, published a new, first-author paper titled “Examining Disparities in Excessive Alcohol Use Among Black and Hispanic Lesbian and Bisexual Women in the United States: An Intersectional Analysis” in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
  7. HBS doctoral student, Amelia Jamison, published a new, first-author article in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review titled “Not just conspiracy theories: vaccine opponents and proponents add to the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ on Twitter.”
  8. HBS doctoral student, Kristy Marynak, published a new report titled “Delay or Avoidance of Medical Care Because of COVID-19-Related Concerns – United States, June 2020” in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Marynak aided the CDC’s COVID-19 response in the Monitoring and Evaluation unit of the Community Intervention and Critical Population Task Force over the summer.
  9. HBS alum, Yonaira Rivera, PhD ’19, appeared on a new episode of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative's The American Health Podcast, to discuss her journey as co-founder of Puerto Rico Stands, an organization dedicated to fostering long-term community resiliency in Puerto Rico. Rivera and her co-founder, Hadi Esieley-Barrera, established the group in the aftermath of Hurricane María.
  10. Kristin Schneider, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in HBS, published a new, first-author paper titled “Conceptualizing overdose trauma: The relationships between experiencing and witnessing overdoses with PTSD symptoms among street-recruited female sex workers in Baltimore, Maryland” in the International Journal of Drug Policy.