Web Feature
Meet the New Faculty
Four new faculty members recently joined the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Find out more about their interests, backgrounds, and what brought them to Berkeley.
Julianna Deardorff | Mahasin Mujahid | Maya L. Petersen | Lonnie Snowden
Assistant Professor, Maternal and Child Health
King Sweesy and Robert Womack Endowed Chair in Medical Science and Public Health
Ph.D., M.A., Clinical Psychology, Arizona State University
B.A., English Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
Julianna Deardorff was working for UC Berkeley psychology professor Steve Hinshaw on a project studying pre-pubescent girls with ADHD when her interest was piqued by the vast discrepancies in pubertal development she observed among sixth grade girls.
Today, as a faculty member, Deardorff is researching the pubertal transition process in girls and how it affects their physical and mental health—particularly among those who go through puberty earlier. She is examining what has caused puberty to start earlier in some girls, and is specifically examining the possibility that the absence of a biological father in a household may induce the early onset of puberty.
Another thrust of Deardorff's research centers on girls and sexual values, especially among young Latinas. She is interested what kinds of issues put young Latina girls at risk for early pregnancy and risky sexual outcomes like contraction of sexually transmitted infections. "What I've really been fascinated with is how the pubertal transition plays out across cultures and how it's different for young Latinas versus girls from other ethnic backgrounds," she says.
In addition, she is interested in the relationship between the early onset of puberty and the occurrence of certain kinds of cancer, particularly breast cancer. It appears that early menarche leads to a higher risk of breast cancer later in life, she notes, but we don't know much about timing of breast or pubic hair development. There is also some evidence that pubertal timing predicts testicular cancer among boys.
"We know that early pubertal timing is linked to a number of deleterious effects for girls," she says. "My hope is that we can start thinking about intervening earlier so that we can potentially ameliorate some of these issues."
Deardorff, who is currently teaching a new adolescent health course, is delighted to be back at Berkeley. "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to play a large role in educating the next generation of professionals and scholars," she says.
Assistant Professor, Epidemiology
Martin Sisters Endowed Chair in Medical Research and Public Health
Ph.D., Epidemiologic Sciences, M.S., Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
B.S., Mathematics, Xavier University
In her work, Mahasin Mujahid examines the multi-level determinants of cardiovascular health and cardiovascular health disparities. She explains, "I'm interested in the role of neighborhood environment in shaping cardiovascular health—what are the specific features of neighborhood environments that matter, how do we measure those features, and how do we then link them to particular cardiovascular outcomes?"
Another major interest of hers is how place and neighborhoods contribute to racial and ethnic differences in cardiovascular risk. "A great deal of the literature considers individual-level explanations and how factors like socioeconomic status or health behaviors contribute to the differences we see across race and ethnic groups," she says. "An additional factor I believe is missing is the role of neighborhood environments over the lifecourse in terms of shaping cardiovascular risk behaviors, subsequently leading to poor cardiovascular health among racial and ethnic minority groups."
She also emphasizes that a common theme in her work is an interest in rigorous statistical methods. "There are a number of methodological challenges associated with studying place in relation to health. For instance, it's very difficult to tease out race and place, and conclusively determine which matters more."
Mujahid hopes that, through her work, she will be able to tell the story of the experience of underrepresented groups. "The reality is that the positive resources and negative exposures that characterize an individual's, family's, community's, and indeed, population's experience shape behavior and preferences," she says. "In communities where it's not safe to go outside, is it fair to blame parents for having their kids planted in front of the television? We must consider the value of being accountable to and for each other, in addition to these unsafe and unhealthy neighborhoods."
She is excited to be on the Berkeley campus where there's a balance between research and teaching. "It's not just about research; it's also about training the next group of public health professionals. That's the nature of the University, and you can feel this immediately upon stepping onto the campus."
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
M.D., UCSF
Ph.D., Biostatistics, M.S., Health and Medical Science, UC Berkeley
B.A., Human Biology, Stanford University
Maya Petersen considers the opportunity to do multidisciplinary research an outstanding characteristic of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. And she should know: She began her association with the School as a student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, then decided instead to pursue a doctorate in epidemiology at UC Berkeley, then switched to biostatistics to finish her doctorate, and then completed her medical degree at UCSF before returning to UC Berkeley as a faculty member. "No one here blinked an eye when I switched," she says.
Regardless of the discipline, her research interest has remained constant: finding better ways to treat people in resource-limited settings (especially Africa) with antiretrovirals for HIV disease, given existing resource constraints. "I'm also interested in the bigger picture: If we are going to invest in infrastructure, what would be smart ways to do it?" she says. "As I got into this area of antiretroviral treatment, it became increasingly clear that you need advanced statistical methods to do a reasonable job of providing those answers."
One of Petersen's current projects concerns the way in which laboratory testing is used to monitor whether or not antiretroviral regimens are working. In resource-rich places, regular viral load testing is used for this purpose. When the virus in a person's body develops resistance to the drugs, the regimen can be changed. However, in resource-limited settings, this type of testing poses resource and infrastructure problems. "There is a drive to make this testing more available," she explains, "but in the meantime, what do we need to do to deliver these drugs now, without the capacity for regular laboratory monitoring?" She is currently looking at use of observational cohort data to answer that question.
There are challenges. "We're not looking at just longitudinal treatment. It's a dynamic treatment strategy—measure, respond, change treatment—and that brings a whole set of analytic complications." But Petersen enjoys the combination of abstract problem-solving and concrete impact afforded by public health. "I'm very much interested in solving real-world public health problems that matter," she says.
Professor, Health Policy & Management
Ph.D., Community and Clinical Psychology, Wayne State University
M.A., Clinical Psychology, Wayne State University
B.A., Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Strictly speaking, Lonnie Snowden is not a "new" faculty member. Though he was appointed to the School of Public Health's faculty only last year, he has been on campus as a professor at the School of Social Welfare since 1978. Moving to the School of Public Health made sense, he says, because his primary collaborators have been public health faculty members.
A mental health policy researcher, Snowden has focused primarily on racial, cultural, and ethnic disparities in mental health, as well as access to mental health care and quality of care. One of his current studies examines the response of California's public mental health system to people who have limited proficiency in English. In another study, he is looking at disparities in African American health care in California, working with community stakeholders to prepare a series of reports that make policy recommendations.
Snowden has also looked at the use of psychiatric hospitals by African Americans. "The pattern of mental health services characteristic of African Americans is to use in-patient care and psychiatric emergency services disproportionately and not to use out-patient care," he says. "We want to try to understand why that's true and what we can do to redesign mental health systems and programs so it will no longer be true."
He describes the general objective of his work as "the design of policies that will enable people to get better mental health care." For example, he has worked to show the effectiveness of Medicaid's Early Periodic Screening Diagnosis and Treatment (EPSDT) program, a comprehensive and preventive child health program that includes mental health. "Our study showed that county mental health programs that were doing the worst before with respect to providing mental health care to kids did a better job after fully implementing EPSDT mental health," he says. "We hope that other states and policymakers elsewhere will see that this can be done."
Twenty-five years ago, Snowden notes, there was no such thing as a field of mental health policy. Since that time, he says, "treatments have gotten better. The pressing policy question is how to create incentives to implement them."