Hopkins Bloomberg School Of Public Health Launches Translational
Epidemiology Initiative
Key Is Asking The
Right Questions To Begin With, Says Director
Concerned about the prevailing trend in epidemiology to
focus more on methods and less on health problems, faculty at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have launched a
Translational Epidemiology Initiative (TEI). “While it’s important to
use the right methods, it’s
more important to ask the right questions in the first place,”
according to David
Dowdy, Hopkins epidemiologist and newly appointed Director of the
TEI at the school.
Why Hopkins?
Hopkins has a long history of employing faculty who
have interest and experience in translating epidemiology into practice
and policy actions, and this new initiative is an outgrowth of that
long history. By creating this initiative, Hopkins organizers hope to
provide more opportunities for faculty members immersed in their own
subspecialties and with an interest in translation to work together to
promote even greater focus on translation.
Training Students
The School hopes to attract students interested in
translation and solving health problems and to create a curriculum
which excites them as much or more than new methods do at present.
Epidemiology is not about giving someone a measure of association and
leaving it to others to do something about it, says Dowdy. His goal is
to help train epidemiologists who ask questions that can make a
difference and are interested in applying these findings to real world
problems.
Vacuum
According to Dowdy, a translational epidemiologist
takes a broader view of issues and does not work in a vacuum. He or
she has relationships with clinicians, policymakers, the media, and
government officials who can talk together and over time find ways to
use results in a productive way.
Dowdy told the Monitor he is not afraid that translational
epidemiologists will be less objective as scientists. There is no such
thing as being completely objective, he said, and translational
epidemiologists need to balance the competing pressures to be good
scientists and to be effective in solving health problems. What’s
needed is a broader appreciation of what it takes to function well in
addressing health questions, according to Dowdy.
Immediate Goals
Currently the TEI at
Hopkins includes approximately 10 faculty who meet almost every month.
Some students and post-docs have been engaged, and the group’s
priorities are to produce a manuscript laying out the case for their
work, organizing a symposium on the translation topic similar to an
earlier one held at Hopkins in July 1998 (https://tinyurl.com/ya4f349q),
planning activities for the upcoming SER meeting, and examining the
existing curriculum to look for opportunities to get students excited.
Challenges
The challenges in accelerating this initiative
according to Dowdy include the fact that everyone is already very busy
or committed and they have difficulty taking on more work. Another
challenge is to make a strong and cohesive case for translation as a
focus area. It has a broad scope and includes many diverse activities
under one umbrella. There is need to develop a stronger intellectual
underpinning to what Sandro Galea at Boston University has
called “an epidemiology of consequence.”
Some think of epidemiology as a narrow field and they have narrow
skills which they seek to hone sharply. Since many of the easiest
epidemiological questions have already been answered, many
epidemiologists are now employing an increasingly specialized set of
skills to find increasingly small effect sizes. The members of the TEI
would like to see more focus on acquiring and using a broader skill
set to interface with a broad group of problem-solving partners on big
questions that are harder to answer.
Favorable Factors
One factor in favor
of the initiative is the sense among some epidemiologists that
epidemiology needs to be seen as a relevant discipline, as a field
which asks and answers questions of consequence. This view may be in
jeopardy now. Other developments which might buttress the TEI are the
growth of the field of implementation science, and the fact that new
research methods are being created to more effectively address some of
the questions of consequence Dowdy refers to.
Among the Hopkins
faculty currently participating in the Translational Epidemiology
Initiative are: Stefan Baral,
Amber D'Souza, Stephan Ehrhardt, John Jackson,
Catherine Lesko, Colleen Hanrahan, Moyses Szklo, and
Mara McAdams DeMarco as well as David Dowdy. ■
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