What’s this about?
The Built Environment & Health (BEH) project is an interdisciplinary program of research at Columbia University. Led by epidemiologist Andrew Rundle, BEH uses spatial data to examine the implications of the built environment, including land use, public transit, and housing, for physical activity, diet, obesity, and other aspects of health. With a focus on New York City, BEH research will inform public policy to promote health in the city and metropolitan area. BEH is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia.
Working Group on Physical Activity, Diet, and Obesity
In the summer of 2004, the Columbia site of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars (H&SS) program began a new Working Groups program to promote interdisciplinary research on population health. One of the first to be funded was the working group on physical activity, diet, and obesity. This group, the forerunner of the BEH project, was led by Andrew Rundle in Epidemiology and co-organized by Kathryn Neckerman at ISERP.
The group has had three main activities. Core group members conducted pilot research in preparation for a major grant proposal submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the fall of 2004. The proposal was funded and now supplies the core of the group’s funding.
Second, in an effort to promote new research on the determinants of physical activity and obesity, the group awarded three small seed grants to Columbia researchers:
James Gangwisch (Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program) is using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the relationship between sleep duration and obesity among adolescents.
Allan Geliebter (New York Obesity Research Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital) is subsidizing the cost of fruits and vegetables for a sample of adult residents of a New York City neighborhood, examining the effect on food purchases, food intake, and body weight.
Helen Kwon (Kellogg Scholar), in collaboration with Mailman faculty, planned to study how the location of fast food restaurants was associated with patterns of overweight and obesity among children.
Third, the group sponsored four seminars during the spring of 2005. Speakers included Rundle, H&SS fellow Molly Martin (now at Penn State), Kathryn Schmitz (Epidemiology, Minnesota), and Michael Greenwald (Urban Planning, Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Seminar attendees included Columbia researchers from a range of fields including endocrinology, epidemiology, nutrition, psychiatry, social work, sociology, urban planning, and sociomedical sciences, and include a number of researchers from the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.
With the award of NIH funding in the fall of 2005, project investigators and research staff began to meet regularly to carry out the core research. The group is also developing new projects on urban design and spatial accessibility. In addition, Gina Lovasi, who will be a H&SS fellow at Columbia from 2006-08, has joined the working group. Lovasi, an epidemiologist, is a specialist in cardiovascular disease and has studied the relationship between built environment characteristics and health outcomes in Washington state.
