Author: Sydney Flowers

Greetings from Urbana-Champaign!  It’s been a busy spring and summer for the MPH Program, with Lunch & Learn events with guest speakers, informative field trips, and exciting graduation events in both May and August.  We just welcomed the new cohort of MPH students and are delighted to have this large group of passionate students on campus.  Please read ahead to learn more about our students in action and upcoming expansion in the MPH program. I hope you’ll share in our enthusiasm about the exciting times at Huff Hall!

Dr. John Kosciulek joined KCH as a professor after 19 years at Michigan State University, where he was a professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education and director of the doctoral program in Rehabilitation Counselor Education.

His research focuses on the social determinants of health of people with disabilities who live in poverty as well as bioethics and disability. He is collaborating with researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy on an investigation of the relationships among policy, disability status, income, and such material circumstances as living conditions, food availability, health equity, and quality of life. In the area of bioethics and disability, his research focuses on such issues as genetic engineering, the right to die, and the relationship between mental illness and gun violence. He developed the Theory of Informed Choice in Vocational Rehabilitation and Consumer-Directed Theory of Empowerment. Dr. Kosciulek earned his Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has received a research award from the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association and served as editor of Rehabilitation Education, the flagship journal of the National Council on Rehabilitation Education.

Dr. Kosciulek said the opportunity to collaborate with other members of the Community Health faculty to develop a master’s degree program in Rehabilitation Counseling was a strong motivator for making the move from Michigan State to Illinois. “The Chez Veterans Center, Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services, and other local and statewide programs offer maximum potential for high-quality clinical training, research, and service provision to individuals with disabilities,” he said. He also is looking forward to developing collaborative research projects focused on community health, rehabilitation counseling, and disability with colleagues within AHS and across campus.

The Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism welcomed assistant professor Dr. Suiwen Zou to its faculty. Her Ph.D. in Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences is from Texas A&M University. After completing her degree, she joined the U.S.-Asia Center for Tourism and Hospitality Research at Temple University as a postdoctoral fellow. She came to RST from a visiting professor position at San Francisco State University.

Dr. Zou’s research seeks to predict tourists’ decision-making behaviors through the application of marketing and psychology principles. She is specifically interested in improving the tourism experience and perceived price fairness through the exploration of behavioral pricing, service recovery, and leisure constraints among marginalized groups. She is applying Justice Theory to explore the effectiveness of different resolution scenarios in restoring travelers’ satisfaction and loyalty after experiencing a canceled flight. She also is examining how skin color and gender impact the participation of Asian American women in pickup basketball and plans to extend this line of research to examine causes of discontinuing basketball participation from high school to college.

The quality of the research produced by RST scholars attracted Dr. Zou to her present position. “Joining RST means that I will have the privilege of working with a group of exceptional scholars,” she said. She also liked the emphasis within the department and the college on the role of leisure and tourism in individual and community well-being and was impressed by the “amazingly substantial” teaching and research support RST and AHS offer.

de Ramirez received two Masters Degrees in Health Economics, and in Public Health, she further pursued her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. She has over ten years’ experience in medical practices, instruction, leadership, and consulting. In OSF, she created the Complex Solution innovation division, a multidisciplinary innovation effort focused on the social determinants of health, aging in place, and vital access to care.

Welcome to a New Year and new decade!

As we look back on a busy and exciting year in the MPH program, we also look forward to the promise and potential of 2020.

Our world is rife with public health challenges. Go to any news source on any given day last year, and you saw stories about climate change and its relationship to the increased severity of natural disasters, how the rapid rise of vaping threatened to reverse decades of progress in reducing tobacco use and its related diseases, and ongoing policy debates about the Affordable Care Act, tobacco regulation, and other public health issues. On a daily basis, MPH students see the importance of their training in epidemiology, policy, and environmental health in events and issues impacting the community, the nation, and the world.

As we embark upon a new decade, we in the MPH program reaffirm our commitment to preparing dedicated public health practitioners who will find creative and effective solutions to ongoing and emerging health challenges. It is a privilege to educate the next generation of practitioners to meet the increasingly varied needs of our field.