Skip to Main Content

Faculty Directory

CPH 507 – Seminar: Systems Thinking for Public Health Practice

No Photo Available

Biography

Persistent challenges in public health—such as health disparities, disease prevention, and implementation of evidence-based health interventions—are often resistant to efforts to change the status quo. Factors at multiple socioecological levels interact in complex ways to produce outcomes that impact health and wellbeing. Standard analytic approaches are limited in their ability to account for this complexity. Systems thinking is an alternative but complementary approach that uses certain strategies and tools for better understanding complex problems and identify potential points of effective intervention. This course provides an introduction to systems thinking for public health professionals. Students learn to apply practical approaches for identifying system characteristics, feedback dynamics driving health and implementation outcomes, and interventions tailored to context. We will also critically engage with broader questions regarding sustained transformation of social systems to ensure health and health equity at the population scale.


¹ CEPH Primary Instructional Faculty
² CEPH Non-Primary Instructional Faculty

Experienced Faculty With Diverse Backgrounds

More than 150 faculty members work within the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. They have a wide range of expertise, from monitoring and assessing health risks and opportunities in populations, to helping build health-supporting social environments through policy, advocacy, and programs. They are educators, advisors, researchers, practitioners and community leaders. They come from backgrounds in quantitative, behavioral, environmental and social sciences, policy and government, exercise and health sciences and anthropology, among many other areas. They all work in collaboration with each other and with community partners, and are especially focused on the training and education of future leaders and practitioners in the public health fields.

Have Questions About Our Faculty?

Contact us to learn more about our expert faculty and their experience in improving public health in the community.