Sara St. George, Ph.D., assistant professor, and Eric Brown, Ph.D., associate professor, both from the Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, will serve as the new directors for graduate programs in prevention science and community health. In this field, Dr. St. George will serve as director for the master’s degree and Dr. Brown will serve as director of the Ph.D. degree.

Seth Schwartz, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, led and was the founding director of the Ph.D. in Prevention Science and Community Health Program. 

“We are very grateful to Dr. Schwartz for his leadership as the founding director of the Ph.D. program and excited to have Dr. St. George and Dr. Brown lead our dynamic graduate programs in prevention science and community health,” said Adam Carrico, Ph.D., professor and director of the Division of Prevention Science and Community Health.

Dr. St. George, who is also a member of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, received her Ph.D. in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating digital family-based pediatric obesity and chronic disease prevention interventions that target positive parenting practices and behavioral skill-building to improve healthy lifestyle behaviors in ethnic minority youth, parents, and grandparents. She currently teaches Qualitative Research Methods and Obesity and Public Health in the masters and Ph.D. programs within the Department of Public Health Sciences.

Dr. Brown, who earned his Ph.D. in Educational Measurement and Research Design from the University of Florida, works on the development, implementation, and testing of community- and school-based preventive interventions in the United States and in Latin America.

Dr. Brown’s research interests center around the application of advanced research methods to evaluate the effectiveness of prevention programs and implementation systems. He currently teaches Implementation Science, Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, and Advanced Quantitative Research Methods in Prevention Science.

Graduate Programs in Prevention Science and Community Health

The Master of Science in Prevention Science and Community Health—accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH)—is a 33 credit hour program that is intended to provide students with training in the fundamentals of prevention science, including the assessment of risk and protective factors that predict and modify health and behavior outcomes, the development of preventive interventions that target these risk and protective factors, and the implementation and evaluation of these interventions.

The Ph.D. in Prevention Science and Community Health—also accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH)—will prepare you with the necessary expertise and interdisciplinary background to contribute to the 21st-century prevention and community health research. Students will be trained in both traditional and innovative areas of prevention science. These include etiology, intervention design and evaluation, innovative data collection and analyses, community-based participatory research, and implementation science.