Dr. Belinda Needham - IHSO Spotlight

Dr. Needham’s path, like many others, was nonlinear. Starting out as a grad student feeling that once you started studying one path, that you had to stay and work within that niche the whole time.

Dr. Needham obtained her Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Texas A&M University, then went on to receive her Masters and PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas, where she studied how mental health problems in earlier stages of life put people at risk for physical health problems later in life.

While completing her doctoral work in Sociology at UT Austin, she realized that not many sociologists were studying the biological mechanisms that link social factors to health. The interdisciplinary work integrating social and biological factors that she longed for just wasn’t present.

Upon completing her doctoral studies, she did an interdisciplinary post-doc at University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health and Society Scholars Program. Here she was able to fulfill her longing of working together in an interdisciplinary team to answer pressing questions regarding health disparities. Through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program, she worked with psychologists, epidemiologists, and geneticists.

It was at that juncture she started asking questions regarding the underlying causes of disparities. “I started getting interested in understanding the biological mechanisms underlying these disparities. At the time people were starting to write about allostatic load and the weathering hypothesis, but a lot of the biomarkers relating to the biological mechanisms weren’t really available in social science data sets.”

“The RWJF Health and Society Scholars program brought people from diverse backgrounds together (e.g. MDs, anthropologist, sociologists, etc) in order to study the social determinants of health. It was here that I started doing work on telomeres looking at the impact of psychosocial exposures on telomere length.” Yet, a lot of this work was done in small samples and she wanted to see more data in larger population-based studies. Following her time in the Health and Society Scholars Program, she then got a job in Sociology but missed the interdisciplinary aspect of what she did during her post-doc so she looked at other

options and went and found Michigan.

How is interprofessional collaboration an important part of your work?

“I certainly couldn’t do what I am doing now without collaborating with others. In my current work on social epigenetics, there is no way that one person can know everything about the field. I need the help of researchers who have expertise in biostatistics and the analysis of big data, as well as biology and biological systems [in addition to my own expertise in the social environment and social exposures], because each area has its own body of literature, evidence, and norms. And how one approaches the same question depends on your

discipline.”

What advice do you have for health professional students as they are preparing to enter their field?

“You have to be good at articulating your perspective, how you think about things, and what you think is important. Having a shared vocabulary is difficult and people need to be on the same page about these things. There won’t always be a shared understanding of the issues when it comes to interdisciplinary work, and you can’t assume understanding across disciplines.”

Also, “in academia it is sometimes difficult for people to adequately assess your work, so it’s important to articulate what you think is important.”

Lastly, Dr. Needham feels that “its more rewarding and fulfilling to do interdisciplinary work. Especially when it comes to health, no single discipline has the answer, and the same can be said for medical professions.”

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Tiwaloluwa Ajibewa is a 2nd year PhD student in the School of Kinesiology studying Movement Science. He is a member of the Childhood Disparities Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan.