Six new faculty members have joined the School of Public Health for the Fall 2016 semester.
Their research interests reflect a wide diversity of topics, from the potential effects of nanotechnology on health to violence prevention, stress, mother-and-child relationships, and the effects of taxes and other policies on people’s use of tobacco and other substances.
The new faculty members are:
Dr. Christa Watson-Wright, assistant professor of Environmental Health, studies the unique environmental health and safety concerns raised by engineered nanomaterials and nanotechnology applications. Before joining Georgia State, she was a lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Jidong Huang, associate professor of Health Management & Policy, is a Second Century Initiative (2CI) scholar in the School’s Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS). His research focuses on the economic analysis of substance use and abuse. Dr. Huang comes to Georgia State from the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Health Research and Policy’s Health Policy Center and Health Media Collaboratory.
Dr. Lucy Popova, assistant professor of Health Promotion & Behavior, is a 2CI scholar. She is also a TCORS researcher focuses on studying how consumers perceive the risks associated with different tobacco products. She previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
Dr. Xiangming Fang, associate professor of Health Management & Policy, examines health interventions from an economic perspective, public policy analysis, violence prevention, and food safety. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia State, Dr. Fang served as Chair for the Department of Applied Economics in the College of Economics and Management at China Agricultural University.
Dr. Kathleen Baggett, associate professor of Health Promotion & Behavior, has focused her career on early childhood education and interventions, social-emotional behavior in infants and young children, and mother-and-child relationships. Prior to joining the School, Dr. Baggett was an associate research professor at the University of Kansas and director of Early Childhood Social-Emotional Health Promotion Research at its Juniper Gardens Children’s Project.
Dr. Claire Adams Spears, assistant professor of Health Promotion & Behavior, focuses her research on informing, developing, and evaluating innovative interventions to improve coping with stress, reduce health risk behaviors, and enhance quality of life in underserved populations. She comes to Georgia State from The Catholic University of America, where she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Mindful Living Lab.