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CUNY SPH is delighted to welcome two new faculty members for the Fall 2020 semester, Professor of Environmental, Occupational, and Geospatial Health Sciences Suzanne McDermott and Associate Professor of Community Health and Social Sciences Sasha A. Fleary.
Professor McDermott is an environmental epidemiologist who joins us from the University of South Carolina School of Public Health. During her career she has applied epidemiology, biostatistics, and health services research methods to answer questions about risk factors for neurodevelopmental disability and health outcomes for people with lifelong disability. Dr. Mc Dermott has maintained an active research agenda that is two pronged. The first focal area is discovery of chemical and infectious risk factors during pregnancy associated with neurodevelopmental outcomes in children. Her second focal area is understanding the intersection of health and disability in order to discover ways people with lifelong disability can maintain or regain optimal health and to develop and evaluate health promotion strategies that are protective. McDermott is the co-editor of the Disability and Health Journal which is in its twelfth year. She has over 130 peer reviewed publications and is the Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on three active grants that are funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Associate Professor Fleary comes to us from Tufts University where she founded and directed the Child Health Equity Research Lab in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. Her mixed methods research focuses on empowering parents, adolescents, and children to engage in healthful behaviors through developmentally and culturally appropriate interventions, programming, and outreach responsive to the risk and protective factors for health disparities in underserved groups. Currently,Dr. Fleary is focused on research is health literacy and preventive health. She is an NIH-funded Building Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Scholar and a PI on an NIH NIDDK R21 grant. Funding through these awards support her measurement and intervention development research focused on adolescents’ health literacy and health behaviors.
Fleary is the co-founder/co-chair of the Child and Family Health Literacy Special Interest Group of the International Health Literacy Association. Her scholarship has been published in in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, American Journal of Health Behavior, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, and Appetite.
“At CUNY SPH we are accountable for maintaining the highest caliber of faculty to create and teach the most innovative and rigorous educational programs possible,” says Dean Ayman El-Mohandes.“I am thrilled that these two excellent candidates have chosen to join our CUNY SPH family and we look forward with great anticipation to welcoming them in the fall.”
