Dr. Michael Long, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health, received a faculty development grant to use Community Based Systems Dynamics (CBSD) work with the first cohort of the DC Youth Health Equity And Leadership (DC Youth HEAL).
With a team from the School of Public Health, the program aims to strengthen these 8-10 local high school students’ ability to engage as student leaders with the school behavioral health (SBH) interactive governance system in Washington, DC. The project plans to co-develop quantitative systems dynamics model user interface, an on-line platform for sharing and analyzing data, that can be shared with system stakeholders so that they can interact with a youth-developed mental model of the school behavioral health system.
In addition to his academic work, Dr. Long is also Affiliated Faculty at the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness and an Associate at the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools. He conducts research at the intersection of epidemiology and quantitative policy analysis with the goal of identifying cost-effective and politically feasible policy solutions to promote school and community health. His work over the past decade has focused on identifying policy approaches to reversing the obesity epidemic in the United States. Dr. Long is also a Collaborating Mentor at the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
