A Report Series on Progress Toward Human Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region

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Consequences of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a cumulative toll on the health and well-being of people in the Gulf of Mexico region. Long-standing societal challenges related to racism, poverty, education, housing, and underemployment are compounding the trauma, leading to chronic stress for many Gulf residents. The Committee on Progress Toward Human Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region new report, Advancing Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region: A Roadmap for Progress, explores key challenges and priorities in Gulf states, including Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas and evaluates recent progress. The report also makes recommendations for closing critical gaps and implementing transformative approaches that focus on the diverse needs and experiences of people who live and work in the Gulf region.

Publication information

204 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-70359-X
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-70360-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/27057

Suggested citation

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Advancing Health and Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region: A Roadmap for Progress. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Maureen Lichtveld

Maureen Lichtveld, MD, MPH, is Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health, where she oversees the growth and continued success of the school’s seven academic departments and hundreds of students, faculty, and staff. She also serves as Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health and is the Jonas Salk Professor of Population Health. Dr. Lichtveld studies environmental public health, focusing on environmentally induced disease, health disparities, environmental health policy, disaster preparedness, public health systems, and community resilience. Her research examines the cumulative impact of chemical and non-chemical stressors on communities facing environmental health threats, disasters, and health disparities. Before joining Pitt in January 2021, Dr. Lichtveld chaired Tulane University’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She also directed the Center for Gulf Coast Environmental Health Research, Leadership, and Strategic Initiatives within Tulane’s public health and tropical medicine school. In this role, Dr. Lichtveld led development and implementation of disaster management, health promotion, and disease-prevention strategies for Gulf Coast communities. Prior to her arrival at Tulane in 2005, Dr. Lichtveld spent 18 years with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, where she designed public health research tools and protocols to guide environmental health studies in communities located near hazardous waste sites. Dr. Lichtveld is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a member of the board of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health. She received her MPH from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Hygiene and Public Health and her MD from Anton de Kom University of Suriname and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

David L. Albright

David L. Albright, PhD, MSW, is a Distinguished Research Professor and the Hill Crest Foundation Endowed Chair in Mental Health Research at The University of Alabama. He is committed to public policy and administrative leadership aimed at improving the health, well-being, safety, and prosperity of vulnerable populations, rural and underserved communities, and our country’s military Veterans. Dr. Albright holds multiple gubernatorial appointments in the state of Alabama with the objective of advising strategies that address the social and community conditions that could improve health, life expectancy, and quality of life, while also reducing related health care costs and productivity losses. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. Dr. Albright received his MSW and PhD in social work from Florida State University.

Richard A. Berman

Richard Berman is the Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives for Innovation and Research at the University of South Florida, visiting social entrepreneurship professor in the Muma College of Business, and a professor in the institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation. He is currently an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (Formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) in Washington, DC, and is a board member for Emblem Health. He is a member of the Seeds of Peace Board of Directors, a board member for the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria and CATAYS, Inc. Additionally, he is the vice-chair of the board of directors for OIC in Florida. He is currently an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (Formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) in Washington, DC, and is a board member for Emblem Health. He is a member of the Seeds of Peace Board of Directors, a board member for the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria and CATAYS, Inc. Additionally, he is the vice-chair of the board of directors for OIC in Florida. In 1995, Mr. Berman was selected by Manhattanville College to serve as its tenth President. Mr. Berman is credited with the turnaround of the College, where he served until 2009. Mr. Berman received his BBA, MBA, and MPH from the University of Michigan and holds honorary doctorates from Manhattanville College and New York Medical College

Jane O. Cage

Jane Cage provides practical and extensive recovery experience as an experienced community leader and entrepreneur. She currently serves as Principal for Insightfive22, a consulting firm focused on long-term community recovery and resilience. Jane is an adjunct instructor at the FEMA Emergency Management Institute teaching courses about the roles of communities after disaster. Jane also serves on the External Assessment Panel for the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning (funded by NIST) at Colorado State University and on the Resilient America Roundtable for the National Academy of Sciences. Before her role as a consultant, Cage served as Chairman of the Joplin Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, a citizen-led group of over 100 community leaders tasked with developing long-term recovery efforts for Joplin, Missouri, after the 2011 tornado disaster. Acting as a liaison between federal, state, and local government representatives, Cage and her team developed a post-disaster recovery vision that brought national recognition for her work. In 2016, Cage chaired the Joplin Disaster Recovery Summit, an event attended by over 300 people from 30 states. Cage received the Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience from the Dept. of Homeland Security in 2012. Cage received her B.A. in both Economics and Spanish from Wake Forest University. She attended the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard University in 2014 and was named Meta-Leader of the Year in 2017 by that group.

Anita Chandra

Anita Chandra is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. The division also manages RAND's Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy. She leads studies on civic well-being and urban planning; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; public health emergency preparedness; effects of military deployment; equity, health in all policies and advancing a culture of health; and child health and development. Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community well-being and to build more robust systems, implementation and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the U.S. and globally; partnering with private sector organizations to develop the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to reform data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Chandra has also partnered with community organizations to conduct broad-scale health and environmental needs assessments, to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to integrate equity and address the needs of historically marginalized populations in human service systems. These projects have occurred in partnership with businesses, foundations, and other community organizations. Chandra earned a Dr.P.H. in population and family health sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In terms of National Academies activities, Chandra is a member of the Resilient America Roundtable, was a contributing author for the consensus study on Measuring Community Resilience, and most recently served on a rapid strategic committee on COVID-19 response and housing evictions.

Tamera Coyne-Beasley

Tamera Coyne-Beasley, Professor of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine, is the Derrol Dawkins MD Endowed Chair in Adolescent Medicine, Division Director of Adolescent Medicine, and Vice Chair of Pediatrics for Community Engagement, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Coyne-Beasley’s academic, community work, policy development and research have focused on adolescent health, resiliency, risk behaviors, health promotion and disease prevention, health disparities, immunizations, community-based participatory and engaged research, health services research, and global health. She received a BA in Chemistry from Brown University in 1987; MD from Duke University in 1991; and MPH with Honors in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997. Dr. Coyne-Beasley is a Past President of the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine, the largest international, multidisciplinary organization of providers serving adolescents and young adults. Dr. Coyne-Beasley has participated in previous activities of the National Academics of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). She was a key stakeholder and participant in the 2002 National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine’s 2002 Working Group on Children, Youth and Gun Violence and the 2018 Behavioral and Mental Health Stakeholder Meeting: Preparing Future Pediatricians to Meet the Behavioral Mental Health Needs of Children co-sponsored by the NASEM and the American Board of Pediatrics. Dr. Coyne-Beasley also was an invited workshop presenter and participant in the IOM and National Research Council of the National Academy’s Improving the Health, Safety and Well-Being of Young Adults. She was invited and served as an independent reviewer of the aforementioned workshop summary document. Dr. Coyne-Beasley also served as a member of the NASEM committee that produced the 2020 report, Promoting Positive Adolescent Health Behaviors and Outcomes: Thriving in the 21st Century.

David P. Eisenman

David Eisenman, MD, MSHS, (B.A, University of Pennsylvania, M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, M.S.H.S. Fielding UCLA School of Public Health) is Professor in Residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, where he is the Director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters. He is also the Deputy Director for Community Partnerships at the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions. Dr. Eisenman’s research focuses on public health and disasters and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Forest Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He was the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Preparedness Science Officer from 2012-2016 where he co-led the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project. Dr. Eisenman is a Member on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Disasters and Emergencies. He was a committee member on a NASEM systematic review of the public health disaster research literature, “Evidence-Based Practice for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response.”

Carlos E. Martín

Carlos Martín (he/él) is an incoming David Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently having served as senior fellow at the Urban Institute. He will also be the Director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University starting fully in 2023. Across his professional roles, he conducts research on the physical quality of housing and communities and the policies and programs that address them. A trained architect, construction engineer, and technological historian, Carlos connects the bricks and mortar of housing to its social outcomes. Before joining Urban, Martín was assistant staff vice president at the National Association of Home Builders for Construction Codes and Standards, SRP professor for energy and the environment at Arizona State University's Del E. Webb School of Construction and School of Architecture, and coordinator for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing. Martín received his BSAD in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MEng and PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University. For the Academies, he has served on the Resilient Roundtable and the Measuring Community Resilience, Deep Decarbonization, US Global Change Research Program Advisory Committees in addition to the the proposed Human Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf consensus study committee.

Robert A. Moffitt

Robert Moffitt is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University and holds a joint appointment with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in 1975 and his M.A. in Economics in 1972 from Brown University and his B.A. in Economics in 1970 from Rice University. Professor Moffitt's research is on the economics of poverty and welfare programs for the poor and the economics of the labor market. He is a past Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health, and is a past Chief Editor of the flagship journal of the American Economic Association, the American Economic Review.

Ronak B. Patel

Ronak Patel earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco and completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at the Harvard-Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned his MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he focused on international health and policy. He founded and leads the Urbanization and Resilience Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. His research focuses on exposing and disaggregating cumulative risks and developing tools and interventions to mitigate these risks to health and development. His recent work and publications has included projects on disaster microinsurance for local market recovery in India, slum upgrading impacts, resilience to urban violence in Columbia, social cohesion and resilience in Haiti, indicators for vulnerability and early crisis in urban slums in Kenya and developing a framework for measuring urban fragility and resilience with the UN University Center for Policy. In addition to numerous publications and presentations, Dr. Patel has led or participated on multiple expert working groups to develop policies and programs for reducing urban vulnerability, improving operational effectiveness and health outcomes and building resilience and currently serves on the WHO Covid-19 Health Cluster Task Force and leads the US Naval War College working group on Civil-Military Coordination in urban areas.

Deanna Wathington

Deanna Wathington is a public health practitioner and family medicine physician who currently serves as Medical Director and Interim Chief Operations Officer for Commonsense Childbirth, Inc. She previously served as Dean of the College of Health Sciences (Bethune-Cookman University), Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs (University of South Florida College of Public Health), Associate Dean for Academic Enrichment (USF College of Medicine) and as the Director of Minority Health for the Florida Department of Health. Dr. Wathington earned her medical degree from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – New Jersey Medical School (1994) (now known as Rutgers University – New Jersey Medical School), Master of Public Health from Temple University (1990), and baccalaureate in Zoology and Physiology from Rutgers University (1985). She completed residency training in Family Medicine at JFK Medical Center, NJ and Bayfront Medical Center, FL. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians and holds an Affiliate Professor designation within the USF College of Public Health and the USF College of Arts and Science. Dr. Wathington currently serves as chair of the Executive Board of American Public Health Association and previously served on the HHS Office of Minority Health Region IV Southeastern Health Equity Council. Her work and scholarly efforts have centered on health equity, clinical-community linkages, women’s health, infant mortality disparities, equitable community development, community health initiatives, and expanding diversity within the health professions. Dr. Wathington brings over 30 years of practice and academic experience in the field with emphasis on collaboration across multiple sectors to address community health and equity issues. Dr. Wathington is the recipient of an AAMC GIA Award of Excellence, the DHPE Health Promotion and Advocacy award and 2020 Florida Outstanding Woman in Public Health award.

Arlanda J. Williams

Arlanda Williams has senior administrative responsibility for the areas of Workforce Development, which provides job training services and continuing education, and Institutional Advancement, which includes college-wide public relations, marketing, development, alumni affairs and support services fo the Delgado Foundation. Williams served three consecutive terms as the elected representative of District 2 on the Terrebonne Parish Council. Williams was the first female elected to serve as chair of the Terrebonne Parish Council and has served four times as chairwoman of the Council. She is active in numerous local, state and federal organizations; more recently Ms. Williams was appointed by Gov. John Bel Edwards to serve on the Southern University Board of Supervisors and the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation Board. Williams is a graduate of Southern University at New Orleans, having earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice, and is also 2014 graduate of Southern University at Baton Rouge with an Executive Master of Public Administration degree and is a current doctoral candidate of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Policy at Southern University.

Scott Wollek

Scott Wollek is a Senior Program Officer with the Board of Health Sciences Policy at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, where he serves as the Director of the Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Disasters and Emergencies. Since joining The Academies staff in 2015, Scott has worked on a range of projects focused on medical countermeasures, civilian biodefense, workforce resilience, healthcare capacity building and other health security topics. Prior to joining The Academies, Scott served as the Senior Disaster Program Manager at The American Red Cross in the National Capital Region. In that role he was responsible for the management of preparedness, response and recovery programs throughout the National Capital Region, including the response to over 500 local disasters each year. During eleven years with the Red Cross, Scott held a variety of paid and volunteer staff positions involving local disaster response, training, exercises, plans and operations. Scott served in leadership positions during disasters and special events including the 2009 and 2013 Presidential Inaugurations, 2010 blizzard and the NCR response to Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Lee, the 2012 derecho, Hurricane Sandy, and the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard. Scott earned a Bachelor’s degree in Emergency Health Services from The George Washington University and a Master’s degree in Public Administration, with a concentration in Homeland Security and Emergency Management, from George Mason University, where he currently serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Biodefense Program.

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A Report Series on Progress Toward Human Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region

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Publication information

Suggested citation

My Academies

A Report Series on Progress Toward Human Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region

Dropdown items

Featured publication

Advancing Health and Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region: A Roadmap for Progress

Description

Collaborators

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Health Care Financing to Improve Availability of Affordable Contraception: Identifying Promising Practices

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Transportation Research Board Executive Office

Gulf Offshore Energy Security, Safety and Risk Management: A Workshop

Adaptive Capacities for Transformation (ACT) Initiative: New Orleans

Adaptive Capacities for Transformation (ACT) Initiative: Mobile