Seattle, Washington, USA, October 4, 2019

From October 1-4 2019, the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science 2019 Annual Conference took place in Seattle, Washington, USA. This year’s theme was “Local, National, Global Impacts on Population Health.”

Ana Diez Roux, Dean of Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, Principal Investigator on the SALURBAL project, and this year’s President of the Association opened the three days of plenary and panel sessions with her address, “Been there, done that. What’s next for population health science?” Her presentation highlighted major achievements to-date by the interdisciplinary community as well as critical challenges to achieving the effective translation of population health research for clinical medicine, for health care policy, and for policies beyond the healthcare sector.

Dean Diez Roux then presented J. Michael McGinnis with the first annual Leadership Excellence Award created in his honor, citing his years of dedication to advancing interdisciplinary cooperation and coordination for improving population health and health science. A series of presentations and reflections on ethics, social values and population health followed, and conference participants then joined dozens of parallel sessions exploring health and health inequities, with conversations focused on the impacts of issues ranging from race and gender identity, to housing and working conditions, to climate change and environmental justice. The scope of research varied from local communities in the United States to populations across the planet.

Usama Bilal opened and led a group of researchers from Drexel’s Urban Health Collaborative in a session and discussion focused on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Health Inequalities in US Cities, presenting research on cardiovascular risk factors and life expectancy in major US cities. Alex Quistberg discussed area and neighborhood-level social disparities and pedestrian road traffic deaths, and Jana Hirsch outlined the development of a quantitative measure of gentrification for urban health research, as well as a survey to measure perceived gentrification among neighborhood residents. Katy Indvik presented the SALURBAL project’s strategy to support the dissemination of transdisciplinary research for improving urban health, as well as results from the first SALURBAL Knowledge to Policy Forum.

More information and highlights from this year’s Conference will be made available here: https://iaphs.org/conference/past-future-conferences/