News | College of Public Health

WET Trial enters next phase of study investigating rates of well water illness

Thousands of families in the counties surrounding Philadelphia get their household water from private wells. Environmental regulations protect public drinking water systems, but public safeguards don’t apply to these privately owned wells, where water quality testing is the responsibility of individual owners and the prevalence of waterborne diseases can threaten residents’ health. A new study by Temple University’s College of Public Health aims to explore illness-causing microbes in residential well water in six counties around Philadelphia. The $3.6 million study, calle...

Water

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Research

Environment

NIMHD-funded study explores how childhood adversity connects to obesity risks

Obesity is an American epidemic, affecting approximately 40 percent of U.S. adults and 18.5 percent of children and adolescents. It is linked to health conditions including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of preventable, premature death. Studies have established that a mix of risk factors, including heredity and environment, can influence weight status, and obesity’s prevalence is higher in certain low income populations. But there’s more to learn about the role of environmental factors, including adverse...

Research

Obesity

School of Social Work

A guide to CPH at the APHA annual meeting

Faculty and students in the College of Public Health will deliver more than 50 presentations at this year’s APHA Annual Meeting, October 24-28. Presentations come from across the college’s numerous research labs, as well as from the Center for Obesity Research and Education, the Collaborative on Community Inclusion, and the Center for Public Health Law Research. A full list of sessions from the College of Public Health and Temple University is listed below. The 2020 annual meeting, held entirely online, includes a mix of live virtual sessions and on-demand recordings focu...

Research

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

School of Social Work

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Health and Rehabilitation Sciences

Health Services Administration and Policy

Kinesiology

Nursing

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Social networks impact odds of stopping injection drug use, study finds

People with a history of injection drug use were found to have better odds of stopping injection when their social networks included more people who don’t inject, according to new research from Abby Rudolph, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. The findings, published in the journal Addiction, are part of ongoing research that Rudolph and colleagues have been conducting to examine the social context of opioid use in rural Eastern Kentucky, a region hit hard by the opioid crisis and Hepatitis C. In her work, Rudolph uses social network analyses to unders...

Substance Use

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Research

Doctoral research on sickle cell in Saudi Arabia earns national recognition

Mohammed Alhajji’s doctoral research has won him two national awards, returned him to his native Saudi Arabia to continue his work, and led him to become, he thinks, “the first PhD student ever to defend their dissertation in a hallway in an empty building.” Alhajji, who graduated in spring 2020 with a PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences, studied pre-med in the United States before switching to public health, and his PhD research combines his biomedical training with interests in policy and behavioral health. It presents an intervention to prevent the spread of sickle c...

Alumni

Research

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Black adults under 65 twice as likely to die from cardiovascular disease, study finds

Black adults under age 65 have more than twice the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease as white adults under 65, according to a new study led by Gabriel Tajeu, assistant professor of health services administration and policy. In a study published in the May 2020 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Tajeu and the research team found that socioeconomic status and cardiovascular disease risk-factor differences between black and white adults are the overwhelming factors accounting for the disparity. "We know that race is associated with an increased risk of cardi...

Cardiovascular health

Health Services Administration and Policy

Research

'CommonHealth', a new journal from the College of Public Health, publishes first issue

Temple University's College of Public Health has published the inaugural issue of CommonHealth, a new academic journal presenting peer-reviewed articles from both the Temple University community and outside contributors. “CommonHealth has tremendous potential to highlight the research and scholarship of our students and faculty not only to our on-campus community, but also to our alumni as well as the citizens of the region and our public health colleagues around the country and world,” said David B. Sarwer, associate dean for research. The journal is managed by the colleg...

Research

Students impress, virtually and in record numbers, at Research Day

More than 100 students logged in via video on April 3 to describe their research and scholarly projects for the College of Public Health's annual Research and Evidence Based Practice Day. The event is a showcase of yearlong projects by the college’s undergraduate and graduate students and is designed to give them valuable experience in setting up public health projects and presenting the results to others. Under normal circumstances, the day is an energetic in-person gathering, with aisles of posters and students describing the work. This year, undergraduate and graduate s...

Students

Research

Fellowship helps VR research move from diagnosis to intervention

In a cinder block basement room in Pearson Hall, inconspicuously down the corridor from the student swimming pools, Geoffrey Wright and his computer programmers create virtual realities. Wright, associate professor in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, runs the Motion-Action-Perception (MAP) lab, where his team develops immersive fantasy landscapes to help diagnose real-world balance and motor skills impairments. Now, with a new Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio fellowship from Temple, Wright will spend a year building a new generation of software tools, e...

Technology

Research

Neuromotor Sciences

Health and Rehabilitation Sciences