Join our Faculty

With a base of over 109 core faculty members and over 800 students – and recognized as one of the nation’s premier institutions of population health and public health sciences with over $50M in external funding for research in 2020 – the Department is building on current strengths to promote the transdisciplinary research and training needed to address today’s many pressing population health issues:

• current and future pandemics
• tobacco and substance abuse
• pollution and climate change
• health disparities with attention to race, sex, age, socio-economic status and other relevant factors
• unsustainable healthcare systems
• understanding the risk factors that continue to drive obesity, cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, dementia and cognitive impairments, and other chronic diseases

The Department’s scholars recognize that these challenges are overlapping and inter-connected in ways that demand coordinated and integrated evidence-based solutions that utilize ‘big data’ and state of the art analysis methods to identify novel risk factors and associated “precision public health and medicine” and policy approaches to improve human health.

The Department conducts research that leverages its location in one of the largest and most diverse populations in the urban United States – Los Angeles County – as well as its collaborations with partners in other communities in the US and in locations around the world.