Research
Objectives
Public health science has been vital in addressing innumerable health and safety threats, leading to remarkable improvements across generations. However, efforts to address persistent public health challenges have not resulted in substantive population-level improvement.
The overarching purpose of the Catalyst and Hub for Innovation in Public Health (CHIP) is to generate breakthroughs for intractable problems and generate return-on-investment commiserate with the needs and resources of stakeholders – including the American public.
The CHIP is grounded in several principles:
1. Siloed approaches are no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of an increasingly interconnected and complex world.
2. Established approaches alone cannot transcend the stubborn problems that we are confronted with, and therefore new approaches are needed.
3. Cutting-edge innovation in public health science can start small and grow big.
4. Transformative public health science can best emerge from the convergence of open-minded individuals, each lending complementary expertise.
Grounded in these principles, the objectives of the CHIP are multifold:
1. To provide a mechanism within the UTHealth School of Public Health for faculty and community to connect and create transformative work.
2. To bridge diverse and novel perspectives within and across disciplines, departments, centers, and beyond.
3. To explore and establish new ideas and approaches that create synergies towards insight and action.
Projects
Catalyzing and Proliferating Systems Science Approaches Within Public Health
Public health science has been historically dominated by a research paradigm that is grounded in reductionism and linear thinking. The hegemony of this paradigm has reduced diversity in the theories, methodologies, and prevention strategies that characterize the field, thereby reducing the ability of public health to meaningfully address many 21st century challenges. An overarching goal of the CHIP is to advocate for novel and innovative approaches in basic and applied research in public health and to provide tangible evidence for their value. These approaches include: 1) systems thinking; 2) syndemic and complex systems theoretical perspectives; 3) qualitative and quantitative modeling, including community-based participatory modeling and computational modeling and simulation; 4) prevention programming strategies that are grounded in participatory approaches and simulation modeling; and 5) transforming the mental models of community members, policymakers, and researchers.
Confronting Endemic and Novel Threats to Commercial Driver Safety and Health
Commercial drivers – especially long-haul truck drivers (LHTD) – endure disproportionately high rates of injury and illnesses. The CHIP is focused on delving into the numerous factors and forces that shape LHTD safety and health outcomes, including, but not limited to: 1) lifestyle (e.g., nutrition); 2) federal and corporate policies; 3) attributes of the built environment (e.g., truck stops); 4) healthcare access/utilization; 5) heat/cold stress; and 6) sleep health. Core to this work is the introduction of novel research approaches that may generate novel, holistic, and complex systems-grounded insights into the causes and consequences of endemic and emerging exposures that impact LHTD. Ongoing and future projects include: 1) collecting nation-wide longitudinal data from LHTD; 2) developing and validating a baseline agent-based model, that can then be extended to multiple LHTD problems; and 3) integrating syndemic theory into LHTD safety and health research and prevention.
Leveraging Complex Systems Approaches to Transform Maternal Health Outcomes
Maternal mortality and morbidity – including severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and cardiovascular severe maternal morbidity (CSMM) – continue to be significant public health issues in the U.S. Black women experience especially high rates of these outcomes, which is observed nationally, in Texas, and within metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW). The CHIP is currently engaged in two projects that apply complex systems approaches, specifically participatory system dynamics group model building (SD GMB) and SD modeling techniques, that focus on: 1) SMM among Black women in Texas; and 2) CSMM among Black women in DFW. These projects seek to generate a holistic understanding of the dynamically complex systems underlying these outcomes, and then translate this understanding into novel, interactive policy simulators for use among community members and policy makers to holistically evaluate the effectiveness of policies and interventions.
Curbing Firearm Violence Through the Application of Systems Science Approaches
Firearm violence persistently clusters within specific geographic locations and population groups. Further, trends in specific types of firearm violence, such as mass shootings, indicate that novel preventive solutions are needed. Evidence has emerged that suggests that new theoretical and methodological perspectives may be needed advance basic and applied knowledge in this domain. The CHIP seeks to explore the dynamically complex etiology of firearm violence and identify new solutions by: 1) advocating for the integration of syndemic theory and complex systems approaches into basic and applied research; 2) using system dynamics (SD) approaches to generate maps of the dynamically complex systems and systems-of-systems that generate these outcomes; and 3) engaging in participatory group model building (GMB) techniques and simulation modeling (including both SD and agent-based approaches) to identify the etiology of these outcomes and identify intervention points.
Integrating Innovative Approaches Across Other Public Health Problems/Contexts
The potential applications of novel and innovative approaches across public health contexts are innumerable. Accordingly, the CHIP has engaged in such work in various capacities within several domains, including: 1) occupational safety and health, ranging from immigrant/migrant hospitality workers to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Total Work Health program; 2) alcohol misuse and related harms among college students; and 3) metabolic health among rural minority communities. Moving forward, the CHIP is intended to be a nexus within the UTHealth School of Public Health for engaging in transformative work across many other public health contexts, as persistent and emerging problems continue to burden the American public.
