Debbie Humphries, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Clinical Public Health; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Humphries, who joined the YSPH faculty in 2007, has an extensive, wide-ranging background in public health research and practice. She has been a consultant in the areas of diet and physical activity, behavior change, sustainability of community health programs, program monitoring and evaluation, and training in participatory monitoring and evaluation for organizations in Vietnam, Africa and in the U.S. She has extended that reach through her Practice-based Community Health Research course, which places student groups with agencies in the State of Connecticut to plan and evaluate programs. Among her sample projects are: Determining the Best Time to Implement Routine HIV Testing in Jails; Barriers to Accessing Health Care and Health Needs of Undocumented Immigrants; Evaluation of HIV/AIDS Prevention, Testing and Care in Connecticut Correctional Facilities; and Strategies to Reduce Low Birth Weight in New Haven: An Evaluation of the Outreach Strategy of the New Haven Maternal and Child Health Department. She is also a member of the Community Research Engagement steering committee at Yale.
Humphries’ research addresses interactions between nutrition and infectious disease, as well as programmatic approaches to improving public health. This work has taken her to Asia and Africa, where she has studied environmental factors and intestinal helminth infections and their relationship to anemia, as well as effectiveness of intervention programs. She is currently collaborating on a longitudinal study to characterize parasite and host factors affecting response to deworming in Ghana.
In addition, she is vice chair of the board of directors of AIDS Project New Haven. In 2016, she was honored with the C.-E.A. Winslow Award by the Connecticut Public Health Association. The award, named for the founder of what would become the Yale School of Public Health, is presented to a public health professional who has demonstrated leadership and achievement in practice, research, and/or education. In 2021, she received the Hartranft Award for outstanding papers from Hartford Seminary, where she earned an MA in transformative leadership and spirituality.
Course Name and brief explanation:
Capstone (EPH 540E & EPH 541E)
This is a second year, culminating course where students have the opportunity to apply the tools and ideas they’ve learned in their coursework. It’s an opportunity to identify a project a student is passionate about, and move it forward as far as possible with support from the course leaders and peers.
What drives you in the work that you do? What are you passionate about?
I am passionate about treating everyone with dignity and respect, and welcoming the contributions all of us can make to public health. My focus on community engagement and supporting students in community engagement comes from personal experience with the knowledge needs of communities around the world, starting with my doctoral research in partnership with international NGOs in Vietnam. The communities (and NGOs) needed information about the issues in the community, and research could help them. At the same time, they didn’t need a multi-site study with thousands of people and a p value of <0.05. They needed specific information about their context, their options, and what they could do to improve the health and nutrition of the community. I’ve been passionate since then with helping communities and smaller organizations get the information they need to make better decisions.
Why did you choose a career in public health?
Years ago, I took a training for transformation course focused on applying Paolo Freire’s tools for transformational change to health. That training used images that can encapsulate issues in ways people recognize. In the accompanying image, you see a figure knee-deep in water wringing out a mop into a bucket, while a faucet is going full blast behind him. I realized that I didn’t want to be mopping, which is the primary work of the health care system, and instead wanted to focus on turning off the faucet.
What is the most significant challenge facing your field of study today?
Owning our mistakes and humbling ourselves to learn from people we consider “non-expert.” – backing away from thinking that “evidence-based” means it should happen regardless of the tradeoffs with other sectors and other needs. The health care system in the U.S., which includes public health, is far too expensive for the life expectancy we have as a country (on par with Cuba). We need to accept that public health is politics and learn to effectively and respectfully negotiate for the public health system needs with all the other essential sectors.