First Trainees Join the Center

We are delighted to announce that we have recruited our first three trainees in systems science applications to public health. Two pre-doctoral trainees have already joined us and are working with Dr. Wang and Dr. Glass to integrate systems science with obesity research on projects at the Center. Our first postdoctoral fellow will be joining us this summer.

The selected students are: new postdoctoral fellow, Claudia Nau, completing her Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology at Penn State University, focusing on simulation models to look at neighborhood effects on health outcomes, particularly obesity (starting August 1st); two pre-doctoral trainees: Dr. Hong Xue, completing the second year of his Ph.D. in Human Nutrition at the Department of International Health, having completed a Ph.D. in Economics at Virginia Tech and coursework in systems modeling; Mehdi Jalalpour, in the fourth year of a Ph.D. program in Civil Engineering at JHU where he has been focusing on systems modeling of public health issues such as predicting flu outbreaks and analyzing human behavior during disasters. He is currently learning to apply these skills to model childhood obesity in Pennsylvania with Dr. Glass.

We are very excited to have such a diverse and talented group of trainees, each of whom brings a depth of knowledge from their own field and has also demonstrated their ability to reach across other disciplines too. Read more about their background and research here.

This is the first group of trainees funded directly by the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity via its five-year NIH U54 Center grant. The Center will be recruiting more trainees in the next five years. Read more about how to apply for the training program here.