We’re delighted to announce a tenure track ASSISTANT PROFESSOR SEARCH. Fields: public management, implementation, governance, institutions & policy process.
We will start reviewing applicants immediately & until position is filled. Start date is negotiable.
usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...
Posts by Roger Figueroa, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.Sc.
Today marks the 16th anniversary of the #ACA. The law covers record numbers of people in #Medicaid and the marketplaces, bans insurer discrimination against people with health conditions, and helps millions afford their health costs. Unfortunately this is all now at risk.
Timely piece by a PhD trainee.
“Science communication and policy literacy are still treated as side projects. Optional workshops. Unpaid labor. Activities you pursue only if you have the privilege of time or institutional protection. They are rarely valued in hiring, promotion, or grant review.”
Excited that this paper is out!
We applied co-location multivariate local join statistics & Generalized Additive Models to assess the joint vulnerabilities to dimensions of environmental injustice at the nexus of income, race, and disability across the U.S. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"you need to learn how to use gAI or you'll get left behind!"
counterpoint!
the absolute fastest way to render yourself unemployable is to build your skillset around a tool that does your thinking for you, that everyone has access to, and that one company can change or take away at any time
Thank you to Connor Freidhoff from our local news station (WENY-TV News) for the feature in a story covering some of the implications of the new SNAP ABAWD work rules.
Link: www.weny.com/news/what-to...
Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication.
For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.
What a throw!
Nutrition colleagues who are teaching and feel like they just lost a bunch of material (DGAs, MyPlate) - this is a great opportunity to teach critical thinking, spot what's changed and critically evaluate the why.
A young girl places a watermelon in a small orange shopping cart while shopping for produce at the grocery store. The text reads: “New policy brief! WIC serves more than 6.7 million low-income people in the U.S. each year. Longer participation in WIC contributes to higher diet quality among infants and young children. By aligning WIC food packages with the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, policymakers can maximize the availability of healthy foods for disadvantaged children.” The Nutrition Policy Institute, University of California logo is included.
🥣📈 Longer #WIC participation = healthier diets! A new policy brief finds kids ages 2–5 who stay on WIC longer have higher diet quality and eat more nutrient-dense, WIC-approved foods. Supporting continued enrollment could help reduce nutrition disparities.
In this new op-ed from @thehill.com, Pasquale Rummo (@nyu.edu) and Jesse Strunk Elkins (UNC Charlotte) show how cuts to SNAP will leave people overworked and underfed, especially veterans, unhoused people, manual laborers, and others.
Read the full piece: thehill.com/opinion/heal...
Results from this study offer an additional lens to complement existing and on-going nutrition security research. Thankful to participants in this study for their valuable time and for sharing their experiences with our team.
🔗: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
One of the main findings highlight how participants use a combination of food-related strategies that vary across food work stages (from food planning to eating), which are dynamically influenced by social and material capital, food environments, and life history.
Great start to the calendar year. Thrilled to share a recent publication in #Appetite led by Dr. Reah Chiong.
In this qualitative study, we interviewed income-eligible food assistance beneficiaries in New York to better understand their lived experiences with food.
This thread perfectly explains why AI has little value for qualitative research.
Yes, large language models can find patterns in qualitative data. But, they're trained on what we already know. So, they won't find anything surprising. And, surprise is qualitative research's primary value-add.
"social science has to answer questions that people beyond academia care about..academia can['t] just be self-referential as it grows infinitely. I think there are challenges to understand what’s going on in the United States and the world and to talk about it to broad audiences in plain language.."
Circulating a petition against a proposal to force UNC system faculty to share their syllabi publicly, a move that would potentially exposing faculty to bad faith actors without necessarily improving student access to syllabi (which are already accessible in the course catalog) #AcademicFreedom
Interventions to enable or improve evidence-informed decision-making in public health and preventive medicine: A scoping review
Emily Groot, Jessica Pelley, Anne-Marie Boylan, David Nunan
www.ajpmfocus.org/article/S277...
As 2025 comes to an end, let us not forget the devastating loss of USAID & its impact for those who suffer from food insecurity and hunger. This New Yorker documentary reminds us about the loss and devastating consequences of rash decision-making. Powerful and tragic but a must watch. bit.ly/4aLjjYP
Americans are watching the prices of groceries, utilities, medical care and housing skyrocket—but Trump says it’s not happening.
and/including much better resource allocation for prevention efforts…
What direction will we take the future of our field of public health?
We are at a crossroads
Dr. Mary Bassett represents the best of us, and I hope will continue to be supported in leading the way forward
Heartened to see much support for her on this petition
docs.google.com/document/d/e...
"Immigrant childcare workers & preschool teachers, the majority of whom work & live in the US legally, say they are wracked by anxiety over possible encounters w ICE. Some left the field, others have been forced out by changes to immigration policy."
apnews.com/article/immi...
I’m so excited to read this paper! In PIBBS no less. ;-)
Academic article: How People Make Meaning in a Fragmented Democracy: Implications for Incorporating Public Opinion into Public Policy
1/4. The U.S. continues to be a place where people’s life experiences and outcomes differ dramatically by social positioning. How does that affect the way people make meaning of what is happening around them? Those questions guided this new paper. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
WIC continues to play an important role in national food security and disease prevention efforts. Our study provides a roadmap of multilevel factors influencing WIC participation as well as highlighting gaps to be addressed in future research and practice. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
WIC is arguably one of the earliest forms of Food Is Medicine in the U.S., providing nutritious food for pregnant/postpartum women and children (ages 0-5 years) as well as health assessments and nutrition education in a healthcare setting.
After 5+ years of hard work, I am excited to share our new open-access publication in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine Focus synthesizing recent evidence on barriers and facilitators to participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Woman, Infants, and Children (WIC).
Brooke Rollins has made a case for sweeping changes to food aid programs by claiming USDA has uncovered "massive fraud." But she and USDA haven't provided the underlying data or any evidence.
Number of SNAP recipients Amazon 2,456 Walmart 2,318 Uber 1,799 DoorDash 1,462 Tempus Unlimited 1,425 Stop & Shop 989 Mass General Brigham 956 Dollar Tree 952 Albertsons Companies, Inc. 896 Bayada Home Health 887
The Boston Globe identified the companies in Massachusetts that employ the most SNAP recipients. A key stat: "In Massachusetts, 74% of working-age recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are employed, half of them full-time."
Full article: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/28/m...