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.
Who’s Who
Investigators, Staff, and Assistants
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Michael Bader
Research Associate
Mike is a data analyst on the Built Environment and Health Project which examines the role of neighborhoods on health in New York City. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan working on his dissertation examining the influence of racial composition on the perceptions of neighborhoods in Chicago. His other research examines methods for collecting and analyzing spatial data of the built environment and racial patterns in residential preferences.
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Julie Britton
Investigator
Julie Britton, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Community and Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. A specialist in cancer epidemiology, she is studying the relationship between energy balance and cancer risk among African American women.
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Catherine Chong
Research Assistant
Catherine Chong was an ISERP high school summer intern in 2006, and a member of the ALR field staff. She is interested in politics and public affairs, and is currently attending Columbia College.
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Carrick Davis
Research Assistant
Carrick Davis is a summer intern at BEH. He is a masters student in social epidemiology and urban planning at the University of Michigan, and his research centers on where social divides become health divides, considering urban planning and design as intervention strategies.
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Serena Deng
Research Assistant
Serena Deng graduated from Columbia University with a dual masters degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Mailman School of Public Health. While at Columbia, she worked with GIS analyst James Quinn on a variety of projects; she is interested in the connections between community development, housing, and neighborhood health.
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Ana Diez Roux
Investigator
Ana Diez Roux, M.D., Ph.D., MPH, is an associate professor of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests include the influence of neighborhood, life-course, socioeconomic status, and the environment on cardiovascular health. Among her research projects, she is co-investigator on the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study.
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Eric Feder
Research Assistant
Eric Feder was an ISERP high school summer intern in 2007 and is interested in math and statistics. He graduated from Ramaz Upper School and is attending Columbia College beginning in Fall 2008.
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Sam Field
Investigator
Sam Field, Ph.D., a sociologist, is currently a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on a variety of methodological issues surrounding the quantitative analysis of spatially referenced data collected in the fields of health and criminology.
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Lance Freeman
Investigator
Lance Freeman, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Urban Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The author of There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up, he is interested in how the physical and social environment affects life chances in the city.
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Silvett Garcia
Research Assistant
Silvett Garcia graduated from Columbia University with a dual masters degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Mailman School of Public Health. While at Columbia, she was a member of the ALR field staff. Her interests are in land use, urban design, community development, and urban health.
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Jits Gysen
Research Assistant
Jits Gysen was a member of the ALR field staff in 2006, and also worked with GIS Analyst James Quinn. She is interested in environmental research and conservation biology.
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Judith Jacobson
Investigator
Judith S. Jacobson, Dr.P.H., is an associate professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. Her major research interests are cancer, asthma, and the role of behavior in health, including the use of complementary/alternative medicine.
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Hyowoun Jyung
Research Assistant
Hyowoun Jyung, a senior at Amherst College, is an intern at BEH during the winter of 2008. She is majoring in International Social Justice, which combines sociology, African Studies, and Political Science, and her interests include health disparities, education, and sustainable development.
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Shang-Min Liu
Research Associate
Shang-Min Liu was a data analyst for the Built Environment and Health project in 2006, and was also a doctoral student in Biostatistics at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She is interested in the application of statistical methods in real-life scenarios.
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Gina Lovasi
Investigator
Gina Lovasi, Ph.D. (Epidemiology, University of Washington, 2006), is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. Her dissertation examined neighborhood walkability and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics as determinants of physical activity and cardiovascular risk. Dr. Lovasi is working with BEH on projects examining how the built environment affects physical activity, obesity, and asthma risk, and is spearheading research on the role of the built environment in obesity-related health disparities in the US. She is also working with data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) to investigate socioeconomic patterns in lung function and subclinical lung disease.
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Victoria Lowerson
Research Assistant
Victoria Lowerson was a member of the ALR field staff in 2006. She graduated in May 2007 from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences with a focus on urbanism and the built environment.
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Joshua Margul
Research Assistant
Joshua Margul was an ISERP high school summer intern in 2006, and a member of the ALR field staff. He hopes to pursue a career in economics, statistics, or law, and is interested as well in social science research.
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Ellen Marrone
Research Assistant
Ellen Marrone was a member of the ALR field staff in 2006. She graduated from Columbia College with a degree in Urban Studies, and is interested in international comparative urban analysis.
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Kathryn Neckerman
Investigator
Kathryn Neckerman, Ph.D., a sociologist, is the associate director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Her research interests include built environment and health, inequality, and urban policy. She is the editor of Social Inequality (Russell Sage, 2004) and the author of Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education (Chicago, 2007).
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Yoosun Park
Investigator
Yoosun Park, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Social Work at Smith College. Dr. Park is interested in the history of U.S. immigration and immigration/refugee policies, international migration and forced migration studies, and social work practice with immigrant and refugee populations.
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Marnie Purciel
Research Associate
Marnie Purciel is a GIS analyst for the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. She has a joint master’s degree in Public Health and Urban Planning from Columbia University. Her interests are in health disparities, nutrition and physical activity-related chronic disease prevention, and in examining and changing the mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect health.
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James Quinn
Research Associate
James Quinn is the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst based at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Quinn conducts medical geography research using spatial modeling techniques. His research interests focus on the exploration of changes in the physical, economic, and social environments, and how they affect the development of changes in physical activity and obesity patterns and health risk.
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Nakita Raghunath
Research Assistant
Nakita Raghunath was an Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy high school summer intern in 2007, and is interested in economics and foreign affairs. She graduated from Princeton High School in Princeton, NJ, and is attending the University of Chicago beginning in Fall 2008.
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Catherine Richards
Research Assistant
Catie Richards is a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. She is an NIH Cancer Training fellow. Her research interests include the epidemiology of cancer and how it relates to obesity, nutrition and physical activity. She is also interested in the built environment and how differential access to healthy food affects health.
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Andrew Rundle
Project Director
Andrew Rundle, Dr.P.H., is an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. His research focuses on physical activity and obesity. He is studying the mechanisms through which sedentary lifestyles and obesity cause cancer, as well as the influence of societal factors such as the built environment, neighborhood socio-economic status, and immigration and acculturation on sedentary behavior and overweight/obesity. In his spare time he is pursuing a side line in surrealist video installation art.
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Juli Simon Thomas
Research Associate
Juli Simon Thomas recently graduated from the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences MA program, and working part-time with BEH as a Data Analyst during 2007-08. She worked previously as an IT consultant and high school math teacher, and is now Coordinator of the Applied Statistics Center, where she is working on a variety of research projects.
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Neelanjan Sircar
Research Associate
Neelanjan Sircar was a data analyst for the Built Environment and Health research group in 2007. He received undergraduate degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics from the University of California-Berkeley as well as a master’s degree in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and is now enrolled in the doctoral program in Political Science at Columbia.
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Gia Storms
Program Coordinator
Gia Storms is a program coordinator for the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program. As a graduate of Barnard College in Women’s Studies, her interest are primarily in social constructions of sexuality.
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Caitlin Warbelow
Research Assistant
Caitlin Warbelow is a recent graduate from the Urban Planning program at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Originally from Fairbanks, Alaska, Caitlin has a background in anthropology and biology which contributes to her current research interests in environmental and international planning and policy.
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Ben Wasserman
Research Assistant
Ben Wasserman was an ISERP high school summer intern in 2007, and is interested in politics and history. He graduated from Roslyn High School on Long Island, and is attending the University of Pennsylvania beginning in Fall 2008.
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Christopher Weiss
Investigator
Christopher Weiss, Ph.D., directs Columbia University’s Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) master’s program. His research examines how social contexts, particularly neighborhoods, families and schools, influence children and adolescents. Current work traces the effects of grade retention on students’ educational trajectories, the influence of adolescents’ friends and peer groups in school, and the effect of disruptive events in parents’ lives on children’s well-being.
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Christine Williams
Investigator
Christine L. Williams, M.D., MPH, is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Children’s Cardiovascular Health Center in the Department of Pediatrics and Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University. Her primary interests concern child nutrition, childhood obesity, preschool physical activity initiatives, and nutritional aspects of cancer prevention beginning in childhood.
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Paulette Yousefzadeh
Research Associate
Paulette Yousefzadeh is a Ph.D. student in social policy at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her research interests include immigration, economic sociology, union activity, and ethnic competition and conflict.
