Gibbons Becomes President-Elect of International Society for Urban Health

M. CHris Gibbons, MD, MPH

M. Chris Gibbons, MD, MPH, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, was elected president-elect of the International Society for Urban Health (ISUH). Also an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Health, Behavior and Society, he will begin his one-year term at the 4th International Conference on Urban Health, which began October 26, 2005.

Established in 2003, the ISUH is a 150-member association of researchers, scholars and professionals from various disciplines and areas of the world who study the health effects of urban environments and urbanization. The ISUH’s immediate past president, David Vlahov, PhD, is an adjunct professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology. Patricia O’Campo, PhD, an adjunct professor in the School’s Department of Population and Family Health Sciences, is the current president of the ISUH.

Gibbons has spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins, where he trained clinically in preventive medicine, general surgery and molecular neurogenetic oncology. He earned his MPH with an emphasis in health promotion among urban and disadvantaged populations and the strategic management of health promotion among disadvantaged populations. This educational foundation, Gibbons said, provided the essential cognitive skills he needs to address the challenge of health in the urban environment. He was also a senior policy fellow at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Department of Health and Human Services, where he gained national insight and health policy expertise.

“We are living in an exciting age, where rapid methodologic and technological advances are contributing to an explosion of scientific knowledge, suggesting amazing possibilities for the advancement of the science of health promotion. The transdisciplinary and integrative nature of the field of urban health provides the perfect laboratory for the development of truly integrative – from molecules to the masses – knowledge,” said Gibbons.

His primary research interests include clarifying the biologic pathways through which socio-behavioral factors influence health outcomes in cancer and cardiovascular disease. A secondary area of interest is the development of effective health interventions to reduce health disparities.

Gibbons, who is also the founding director of the Center for Community Health Education, Advocacy and Leadership Training at Hopkins (HEALTH), is a member of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions and was named a Health Disparities Scholar by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.