Are you interested in understanding how communication can influence health? Are you interested in a team science approach to solving the toughest public health problems facing society? Are you excited to learn mixed methods to answer hard research questions?  Then consider applying for a doctorate in public health.

I am looking for qualified and motivated students to work on issues of communication, culture, and health. Interested candidates should email a CV and statement of research interests to schedule a time to speak by phone. Applications will be reviewed in early January so do not delay! Apply here.

Please join us for a teach in
Don’t turn our tragedy into hate
Monday, November 16
6:00-9:00pm
Gallo Recreation Center

Presented by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Faculty

Discussion centered around these questions:

• What does mental health have to do with this?
• What has been the narrative and why?
• Why are men more likely to be perpetrators of violence?
• Why are campus police armed?
• How do we define our community – what lives are grievable?
• What do race and religion have to do with this?

This week I am at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Chicago. I'm presenting work funded by the Hellman Foundation that sought to map the health information environment in Merced County.

Decades of communication science have established that media are an important source for health information, and can contribute to behavior change. This is especially true for ethnic minority populations who rely on and trust information from the media. However, health information is unequally distributed - that is, different groups of people have different access to and ability to make sense of information - and this inequality may be compounded in rural regions with geographically-dispersed populations that face multiple barriers to health, including high rates of poverty and unemployment, low educational attainment, and lack of access to healthy foods, opportunities to engage in physical activity, and medical care. These are precisely the kinds of places that can benefit from information from the mass media, which can diffuse health information across wide spaces, and where the majority Latino population are heavy users of media and place trust in media as a source of information. 

Our research demonstrated that there is a dearth of health information available in the region as a whole, and that there are communities that suffer especially hard -- areas that we can characterize as "information deserts"*. Like food deserts, information deserts are communities that lack access to health information in general, especially information that can be useful to improve health. 

We are working to publish this work and moving toward interventions to remedy the situation. 

* Thanks to Amy Leader for helping me to coin this term!