Every year, STAT, the journalism organization focused on reporting on topics in health and medicine, celebrates a cohort of excellent “rising star” early-career researchers in health and medicine as part of the STAT Wunderkinds program. This year, Stephanie V. Hall, Ph.D., MPH, joins the 2024 STAT Wunderkind cohort. Dr. Hall is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Perinatal Mental Health Services and Policy Program in the U-M Department of Psychiatry.
In this brief Q&A, we asked Dr. Hall a few questions about her field, her work, and her advice for other early-career scientists.
This award is for early career researchers who are on the cusp of launching their careers but not yet fully independent. From this vantage point, what do you see as the cutting edge of research or most important questions that remain unanswered in your field of perinatal mental health, reproductive health, and social determinants of health shaping the experiences of families more broadly?
Our biggest challenge is action. We can generate a lot of really interesting information, and we can create a lot of really cool local interventions, but leveraging actionable information to improve population health at scale is tricky. This is why my team and I have emphasized interdisciplinary collaboration, triangulation of multiple data sources, and evaluation of real-world patterns in health. We focus on societal and policy-level drivers of health because these factors set the landscape for health, healthcare, and health outcomes.
What next area of research is drawing your attention in your own work?
My past work has focused on documenting and describing disparities. I want to shift my focus upstream and look at the structural components that cause those disparities – and at how we can restructure our societal and policy landscape to improve mental health for birthing people.
The Surgeon General just released an advisory piece on the urgent need to better support parental mental health and underscored a multitude of driving forces, including limited social infrastructure, economic disparities, barriers to affordable health care, inaccessible childcare, and so on. I want to start teasing apart these overlapping and intertwined problems to look for answers for what’s driving the parental mental health crisis. Where are the levers? Where are the pressure points? What policies have moved the needle in the past? How can we replicate that to further promote parental mental health?
What projects or papers from the past few years have inspired you or excited you in choosing the direction of your work in the future?
Arline Geronimus, ScD, had a really profound impact on my understanding of maternal health research and my goals for my own work. While she’s been a prominent name for more than the past few years, her decades-long career presents a really compelling argument that maternal health research follows the hegemonic norm and our approach to health promotion often fails to acknowledge heterogeneity. She taught me the critical tenet that “health promotion is not universal.” In other words, different people, living in different environments, have different needs.
If we don’t honor that heterogeneity, then our efforts to improve health may prove deleterious. Her lessons inspired my appreciation for precision or personalized health, which aims to tailor health interventions to every single individual. Understanding individual health needs requires a lot of data, sophisticated analytics, and careful interpretation. Dr. Geronimus did all of those things long before we even had the term “precision health.” It really inspires me to craft a research portfolio that measures variation, rather than trying to control variation.
Do you have any advice for researchers in earlier stages of career development?
My biggest piece of advice for early-stage researchers is to find a mentor who will champion you.
Finding traction as an early-stage researcher requires snowballing opportunities, and a good mentor can help you get that ball rolling. A mentor who’s generous with their time, feedback, and networking is critical. I’m a true believer that “science is a team sport.” Finding teammates who support you (and who you want to support!) will amplify everything you do.
To learn more about Dr. Stephanie Hall’s work, visit the Perinatal Mental Health Service and Policy Program website.
