Education

PhD, Sociology, Princeton University

MPH, Population Planning and International Health, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

BA, Biology and Psychology, Mercer University (Magna Cum Laude)

Biography

Mark VanLandingham, PhD is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at Tulane University.  

VanLandingham and Dr. Katherine Andrinopoulos co-teach the introductory course to the IHD program each fall, GCHB 6340 Health Problems of Developing Societies. 

Regarding research, he directs Tulane's Center for Studies of Displaced Populations (CSDP).  He currently leads teams focusing on rural-to-urban migration within Southeast Asia; disaster recovery; and acculturation, health and well-being among Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.  His recent book, Weathering Katrina, focuses on these latter two topics.

His office is 2228 Tidewater.

Why you should do your MPH degree in International Health and Development at Tulane:

You should do your MPH degree in International Health and Development (IHD) at Tulane University because we're the best MPH program in IHD in the world for students. While some other schools are listed higher in the USNWR rankings due to their large number of NIH awards and their extremely long lists of affiliated research faculty, neither of these criteria should be of central importance to students seeking the best school for them. No other school of public health can match the quality of teaching that our faculty provide, nor can they match the mentoring and nurturing that our students receive at Tulane's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.  We're not only the first school of public health established in the U.S., we've been student-centric since the very start, back in 1912. We have a rigorous course and faculty evaluation system in place, and students regularly rate our faculty to be outstanding in the classroom. For the fall 2018 semester, for example, the average student evaluation score for having their course meet their expectations on a scale of 1 (no) to 7 (perfect satisfaction for everyone) was an outstanding 6.0. For their evaluation of faculty expertise, these average scores were even higher: 6.7. These are remarkably-high teaching scores for any institution, but especially for one in which the faculty are leaders in their research fields as well as gifted teachers.  Tulane's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine is the best school of public health for students because our faculty are both world-renown experts in public health research and also prioritize teaching and mentoring the next generation of public health specialists.

We're also one of the longest-standing and most prestigious programs in International Health and Development (IHD) * in the world. We've been doing this for over four decades now, having trained and placed hundreds of specialists around the world. Current IHD faculty and students and recent alumni work in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and elsewhere throughout the world. It is no accident that Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) find the IHD Program at Tulane so attractive. Several of our faculty began their careers in the Peace Corps, too.

Whether you're planning to work overseas in a low or middle-income country or among disadvantaged populations within the U.S., New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Deep South provide outstanding boots-on-the-ground opportunities to develop and hone your public health skills and expertise.

That we get to do all of this while living in the magnificent Big Easy is lagniappe.**

* Many other schools of public health have recently "discovered" the field and have embraced the more recent and trendy moniker "Global Health," but we're sticking with IHD because of its staying power (we've been doing IHD since the 1970s) and its explicit focus on 1) the special problems of low-resource countries and 2) income and health disparities between rich countries and poor countries.

** Lagniappe: something given as a bonus or gift.

Dr. VanLandingham with Tulane students and Thai colleagues in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

Publications

Selected recent publications:

VanLandingham, Mark. 2017. Weathering Katrina: Culture and Recovery among Vietnamese-Americans. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Weathering Katrina

VanLandingham, Mark. 2015. Opinion/Editorial: Post-Katrina, Vietnamese Success.  Sunday Review; Gray Matter. The New York Times, August 14, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/post-katrina-vietnamese-success.html

VanLandingham, Mark. 2011. Opinion/Editorial: Making murder count. The New York Times, July 16, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/opinion/16vandlandingham.html

VanLandingham, Mark. 2014. On the hard and soft sciences in public health. Public Health Reports 129(2).

Anglewicz, Philip, Mark VanLandingham, Lucinda Manda-Taylor, and Hans-Peter Kohler. 2018. Health Selection, Migration, and HIV Infection in Malawi. Demography (first online 27 April 2018).

Stroud, Joshua, Mark VanLandingham, and Philip Anglewicz.  2016. Development, demographic processes, and public health. In Hooks, Gregory, editor. Handbook of Development Sociology. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Nauman, Elizabeth, Mark VanLandingham, Philip Anglewicz, Umaporn Patthavanit, and Sureeporn Punpuing. 2015. Rural-to-urban migration and changes in health among young adults in Thailand. Demography. 52(1): 233-259.

VanLandingham, Mark. 2015. Promoting teamwork, from within and from afar. In Dingwall, Robert, and Mary McDonnell (eds). The Handbook of Research Management. London: Sage.

Fu, Hongyun and Mark VanLandingham. 2012. Mental health consequences of international migration for Vietnamese Americans and the mediating effect of social networks: Results from a natural experiment approach. Demography 49(2): 393-424.

View Dr. VanLandingham's other publications at his NCBI profile page.