National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine appointed next associate dean for research

Dean Thomas LaVeist announced today that Dr. Kelli Stidham Hall will be appointed associate dean for research when she joins the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine as a professor in the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences on July 1. She will hold a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology.

Dr. David Chae, who has served as associate dean for research for four years, will complete his service through the end of June and will aid in the onboarding of Dr. Hall to ensure a seamless transition.

In addition to becoming an associate dean, Hall is expected to hold an endowed professorship, to be announced at a later date. She will also be named co-director of the Mary Amelia Center for Women’s Health Equity Research.

“Throughout her career, Dr. Hall has pursued a multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach to research that has allowed her to maximize her innovation and impact,” said LaVeist. “This ability to work across traditional boundaries will prove beneficial in her administrative, academic, and leadership roles at Tulane SPHTM.”

Hall comes to Tulane from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where she has been an associate professor of population and family health since 2020, the same institution where she earned her doctoral degree in maternal and child health and epidemiology. Trained as a social and reproductive epidemiologist and advanced practice nurse, she has nearly two decades of experience conducting interdisciplinary research to understand and address the social and structural determinants of and solutions for maternal, women’s, and reproductive health equity in the U.S. and globally.

Over the course of her career, Hall has raised over $70 million in grants, has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and is currently the principal or multiple principal investigator of five NIH awards. She was the founding director of the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast at Emory University and co-director of Columbia’s NIH U54 Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence.

Her tremendous achievement led to her election in 2020 as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine.

During his four-year tenure as associate dean for research, Chae envisioned and implemented several initiatives to enhance the research environment, including the COVID Rapid Response Grants, the Diboll Research Excellence Fund, and the SPHTM Proposal Submission Program. He also led the charge to develop a faculty research database and facilitated expanded research opportunities for faculty.

Chae has been an advocate for restructuring the research administration of the school and recently oversaw the transition to the new Research Administration Service Unit (RAS-U) model. Now that this monumental task is underway, he will stpep down to focus on expanding his research initiatives this upcoming fiscal year. He will continue to serve as a core faculty member in the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences and lead his research program, the Society, Health, and Racial Equity (SHARE) Lab.

LaVeist expressed his appreciation for Chae’s leadership in developing a more well-established research infrastructure. He also shared his confidence in bringing Hall on as the next associate dean for research.

“Dr. Hall is well positioned to continue to grow our research enterprise in new and exciting ways, and I look forward to her leadership,” he said.