Throughout its history, the Friedman School has fostered the scholarship of doctoral candidates who focus their research on improving the health of both domestic and internationally-based communities.
Health Policy Research Scholars, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a national leadership program for doctoral students starting their second year of study. Doctoral Candidates Marcia Rahman and Yui Chang Chusan are the most recent Friedman School scholars to join this prestigious program. They join current RWJF Scholar and Friedman School Alumna Nayla Bezares.
Both Marcia and Yui work closely with the Friedman School’s ChildObesity180 and Food Is Medicine Institute teams, Yui working with the Catalyzing Communities Initiative and Marcia with Delta GREENS. Read more about Marcia, Yui, and Nayla’s research aims below, excerpted from their respective Health Policy Research Scholars profiles.
Marcia Rahman
Marcia envisions communities with equitable access to the essential resources needed for overall health and wellbeing. Marcia’s research interests focus on the intersection of diet-related diseases and the sociopolitical determinants contributing to nutrition and health inequities in vulnerable populations. By investigating this intersection and employing behavior change science to guide intervention strategies, she aims to leverage her research to inform policy priorities and program designs that address the structural and systemic drivers. Her research will emphasize multidisciplinary collaboration, power sharing, and equity-centered approaches.
“I’m honored to be part of the newest cohort of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation HPRScholars where I’ll use my doctoral research to advance health equity through policy change and work alongside scholars from across the country,” says Rahman. “This program will allow me to grow and collaborate with diverse perspectives, all while advancing a shared goal of building a culture of health. I’m excited for what’s ahead!”
Read More About Marcia
Yui A. Chang Chusan
Yui’s vision is to level the playing field for everyone to thrive, which starts with creating opportunities for individuals to access the most basic needs such as housing and nutritious foods. Yui is interested in systems-thinking, interdisciplinary, community-participatory, and actionable research that positively impacts policies, systems, environmental, and/or narrative changes. In her research, she aims to employ community-based systems dynamics to identify and address psychosocial and structural determinants of health, particularly related to housing and food access among communities with low incomes, as well as examining the processes involved in moving from participatory research implementation toward real-world actions.
Read More About Yui
Nayla Bezares
Nayla studies the sustainability of food resilience strategies in Puerto Rico, such as increasing local food production and expanding highly diverse agricultural systems. The long-term goal of her research is to provide policymakers with relevant information to develop support structures that promote local food system resilience in Puerto Rico by incentivizing agricultural activities that preserve environmental resources, support a healthy food environment, and provide dignified and equitable economic development opportunities. In her research, Nayla applies food system modeling approaches to estimate the land carrying capacity to feed the local population and to estimate the impacts of local food production across environmental, economic, and social domains.
Nayla was awarded a dissertation grant in the Summer of 2024 for her doctoral dissertation titled “Assessing Agricultural Self-Reliance and Sustainability in Puerto Rico Using Food Systems Modeling Approaches”.
Read More About Nayla