What’s in a zip code? Your health, as it turns out
Dean David Bangsberg discusses the role public health education plays in addressing social determinants of health.
David Bangsberg M.D., M.P.H., wanted to be a neuroscientist. But two years into medical school at Johns Hopkins University, he traded his full-ride scholarship in the M.D./Ph.D. neuroscience program for a career in public health.
It wasn’t because brain surgery wasn’t important, he explained at Tuesday’s OHSU Illuminate luncheon. For him, the public health issues he witnessed first-hand as a medical student in east Baltimore — drug addiction and the HIV epidemic of the 1980s — simply couldn’t be ignored. From that point on, his goal was to help end public health disparities worldwide.