About

For the most part my work in public health focuses on chronic disease prevention and maintenance and healthcare delivery system innovation. My epidemiology work benefits from my broad experience with financial, clinical, demographic, socioeconomic and geographic data and my passion for data-driven problem solving. Because of the United States’ increasingly challenging chronic disease burden and also my community activities, my approach to health encompasses our built and social environment and the systematic and generational inequalities that shape risk factors and opportunities for health.

I am inspired by fun theory and creativity as the first steps towards building empirically validated, value driven, interventions for better health for all. My approach fosters collaboration among experts and local and regional actors to shape the urban environment with implications for the future of public health. I am concerned about purely medical views on health. My research questions take a contextual, health in all policies approach.

At Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, my research sought to document, quantify and map socioeconomic characteristics of the built environment with implications for health and wellbeing. My thesis, “A Public Health Perspective on a Self-Supporting Bike Share: NYC’s Citi Bike,” remains a work in progress.

I also have experience in health information technology, especially the development of digital health tools to empower low-income, medically underserved and complex, mental disorder and medical comorbidity patient populations. I develop experimental and quasi-experimental studies to evaluate pilots and population health interventions. Along these lines, I analyze the practical interdisciplinary side of implementation including valuation and returns on investments for health and prevention, applications to policy, and methods for calculating social returns on investment.

I am passionate about data visualization and art.

My blog is Red Infrastructure, Health Horizons and this is my Twitter; my website is lorisuzanne.me.

I am an MPH epidemiology candidate at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health. I hold an MPA in Public and Non-Profit Management, Public Finance, from NYU Wagner School of Public Service. I am a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. I was born in New Orleans and New York City has adopted me.

“…Obesity, inactivity, depression, and loss of community has not ‘happened’ to us; rather we legislated, subsidized, and planned it.”

-Dannenberg et al. 2012, Making Healthy Places