April 7: Douglas Jutte, "Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development"

Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development

There is growing interest in the social determinants of healthy child development, and more specifically, in understanding the ways that low-income social environments can have a negative impact on child development. This presentation by Douglas Jutte will describe an exciting research initiative to examine efforts to improve low-income neighborhoods and their effects on the health and well being of children and families. Douglas Jutte is a developmental pediatrician who has recently received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to add health and development measures to a large community development project. He will describe the history and function of the national non-profit community development sector and discuss how the $150 Billion (yes, Billion) invested annually into low-income neighborhoods has the potential to have a positive impact on understanding--and improving--important social determinants of child and family health and well-being. Achieving these goals will require partnering between the national non-profit community and researchers with expertise in child development and public health to more effectively understand how improvements in low-income neighborhoods can have a positive effect on the social determinants of healthy development.

Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH is a professor and population health researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He teaches in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and serves as associate director of the master’s degree in Health & Medical Sciences. He has been a leader in the Federal Reserve & Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Communities Initiative that aims to increase the positive impact of community development and public health by better integrating the work of these two sectors, and he will soon be Executive Director of the newly formed National Partnership for Community Development & Health. His research focuses on the impact of social determinants of health on children’s wellbeing over the life course as well as the policy levers and financial tools that can intervene to protect children and families. He has published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Epidemiology, Academic Pediatrics, the American Journal of Public Health and Health Affairs. Dr. Jutte graduated from Cornell University and received his MD from Harvard Medical School and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. His post-doctoral research training in population health was through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health & Society Scholars program based at UCSF. He completed his pediatric training at Stanford University and continues to care for at-risk newborns as a neonatal hospitalist.

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm.