Stephanie A. Robert

"Being a director of the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar Program is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job as a faculty member. The opportunity to discuss, debate, and learn from each other is a luxury for not only the scholars, but for John, Dave, and me as well. We purposefully keep our weekly seminars small, including just the 6 scholars, the three co-directors, plus a couple other faculty who we invite to participate for the year. This allows us to build an intimate intellectual community where our ongoing population health discussions and debates build upon each other over time.

My own research is broadly focused on social and economic determinants of health over the life course. I have a particular interest in how neighborhood socioeconomic and racial contexts affect individual and population health at older ages. Some of my new work, however, focuses on how we might take our broad research knowledge of social and economic determinants of health, and translate that knowledge in ways that will help the general public and policy makers treat social policy as health policy. My personal struggles to bridge basic social science research with applied issues are consistent with one of the goals of our program - to expose scholars to issues of translating research into practice and policy arenas. Through example and discussion, we aim to help scholars address the practical and intellectual dilemmas of bridging population health science and practice/policy."

Health & Society Scholar Haiku
Oh what a program
Time and stimulating folks
How can you go wrong?

Stephanie A. Robert, M.S.W., Ph.D.

Stephanie A. Robert, M.S.W., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also on the Population Health faculty and is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Institute on Aging, the Center for Demography and Ecology, and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. After receiving a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and in Social Work from the University of Michigan in 1996, Dr. Robert spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco. Dr. Robert has two main lines of research. She is interested in socioeconomic inequalities in health over the life course and her recent work examines how neighborhood socioeconomic context impacts individual health and well being. One of her articles in this area won the 1999 Eliot Freidson award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association, for the best article in Medical Sociology. Dr. Robert is also interested in community-based long-term care programs and policies for older adults. She is currently examining various aspects of "Family Care", Wisconsin's long-term care redesign pilot program which is attempting a managed care approach to providing publicly-funded long-term care supports and services.