Congratulations to Yin Wang, PhD candidate in Tulane’s Health Policy and Management Program, for winning the Best Poster of the Year Award from the Delta Omega Honor Society (DO) at the APHA annual meeting this year! (DO includes 131 chapters competing for the top award for the entire public health honor society.) Yin’s poster was titled, “Guaranteed Cash Incentives Increased COVID-19 Vaccinations of Young Adults: Natural Experiment Evidence from West Virginia.” Yin used regression discontinuity combined with differences-in-differences to leverage the below-age-35 cutoff for the incentive program to identify the causal impacts. The small cash incentive program was found to be more effective than lottery-based vaccine uptake programs, though costs were larger presenting decision makers a dilemma when determining the value of additional vaccine uptake.
Second year PhD student, Shelby Olin was selected by the Student Paper Awards Committee to present her research in the Medical Care Section at the 2024 APHA Annual Meeting and Expo. This work focused on understanding the long-term impact of Medicaid expansion on not-for-profit hospital community benefit spending in Louisiana. She collaborated on this work with her advisor, Dr. Tatiane Santos and faculty member, Dr. Charles Stoecker. Shelby plans to continue this work when she finishes her coursework and begins her dissertation.
Man Tang won an award for Best Student Poster Research Presentation at ISPOR, the leading Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research for her work on Long-Term Cost-Effectiveness of Tirzepatide Versus Placebo for Individuals With Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity. Numerous Tulane students and faculty presented and/or had posters at the conference.
In 2024, Senior Instructor Emily Harris won both the Student Government Association Teaching Excellence Award (at the graduate level) and the Outstanding Undergraduate Public Health Teaching Award. This is the second time she has won the Student Government Teaching Excellence Award (2022). These awards are given to faculty members recognized for their ability to teach, advise, and give direction, proving themselves to be approachable and accessible educators and mentors for their students.
Tatiane Santos, Health Policy and Management assistant professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has been awarded a Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award (K01), which is a five-year career development grant administered through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The program helps ensure that a diverse pool of highly trained scientists is available in appropriate scientific disciplines to address the Nation’s health services research needs.
The Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) announced Brigham Walker as a member of the newest cohort of K12 Scholars. Selected through a rigorous competitive process, K12 scholars receive two years of comprehensive clinical and translational science development support. The CCTS K12 program prepares early-career faculty who have recently completed a research or health professional doctorate for a career in translational research. The goal of this program is to impart the knowledge, experience, and perspective required to develop a network of independent investigators, with an emphasis on research that addresses diseases and health disparities that disproportionately affect the Deep South.
