| Eileen Crimmins | Lifespan and Healthspan Eileen Crimmins is the AARP Chair in Gerontology, and University Professor at the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angles. She directs the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health, the US NIA sponsored Biomarker Network, and the Multidisciplinary Research in Gerontology Training Program. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for research from the Gerontological Society of America. Crimmins is a demographer whose work focuses on health and aging. Crimmins pioneered the development and modeling of the concept of healthy life expectancy to examine the interaction of trends in life expectancy and population health. Her work has clarified improvements in life expectancy can be linked to increases in the prevalence of major diseases and disability in the population. She has also worked to promote the incorporation of valid and reliable biological data in population surveys in a number of countries. |
| Sherman James | Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: The Promise and Perils of John Henryism A social epidemiologist, Sherman James is a Research Professor of Epidemiology (Rollins School of Public Health) and African American Studies (College of Arts and Sciences) at Emory University. He assumed his current position on July 1, 2014 after retiring from Duke University on June 30, 2014. At Duke, he was the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor of Public Policy (2003-2014) and held secondary professorships in Sociology, Community and Family Medicine, and African and American Studies. Prior to Duke, he taught in Departments of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1973-89), and the University of Michigan (1989-03). At Michigan, he was the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health, the Founding Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health (CRECH), Chair of the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, and a Senior Research Scientist in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. James received the AB degree (Psychology and Philosophy) from Talladega College (AL) in 1964, and the PhD degree in Social Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, in 1973. James is the originator of the John Henryism Hypothesis which posits that repetitive, “high-effort” coping with social and economic adversity contributes to the well-known excess risk for cardiovascular diseases (e.g., hypertension, stroke, heart disease) among poor and working class individuals, especially African Americans in these positions. James was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2000. In 2001, he received the Abraham Lilienfeld Award from the Epidemiology section of the American Public Health Association for career excellence in the teaching of epidemiology. In 2008, he received a Health Policy Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Epidemiological Society, the American College of Epidemiology, the American Heart Association, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In 2007-08, he served as president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER). In 2008, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Washington University in St. Louis. |
| Douglas Jutte | Health Happens in Neighborhoods (and what we can do about it!) Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH, is the Executive Director of the Build Healthy Places Network, a national organization that catalyzes and supports collaboration across the sectors of community development, finance, and health. He has been a leader in the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and RWJ Foundation’s Healthy Communities Initiative, which has convened over two dozen conferences across the country bringing together leaders from these sectors. A pediatrician, associate professor and population health researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, Dr. Jutte’s research focuses on the impact of poverty and other social determinants on children’s health and the potential for investment and policy interventions to protect at-risk families and communities. He has published in a number of prominent journals including Epidemiology, Pediatrics, the American Journal of Public Health, PLOS One and Health Affairs. A graduate of Cornell University, Harvard Medical School and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Dr. Jutte’s clinical work has been in low-income community clinics and as a hospitalist caring for newborn infants. |
Population Health Initiative
