Posts from Jen Makelarski, PhD, MPH

Jen is an epidemiologist. Her most recent work focuses on assessing and addressing health-related social risks among vulnerable populations including women, minorities and friend and family caregivers. She was the lead epidemiologist on the development and evaluation of the CommunityRx intervention, a resource referral intervention that provides personalized information about health-promoting community resources to people during regular clinical care. She is especially interested in interventions to reduce food insecurity and played a lead role in the establishment of Feed1st, a hospital-based food pantry program. To best solve these social justice issues, Jen hopes to continue to emphasize the value of understanding the mechanisms by which such interventions work in order to maximize their impact, but also pair traditional epidemiologic methods with system science methodologies to better assess the impact of clinical and public health interventions.