Chair's Message

Welcome to the Department of Medical Social Sciences (MSS) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. This website offers information about the transdisciplinary and collaborative research we lead and support that aspires to harness social and behavioral sciences to advance equity, innovation and impact in health.

Who We Are

We are proud that our department is — and has been — the leading public health department in a medical school since 2015. Values that guide our approach include innovation, collegiality, collaboration, inclusivity and a strong commitment to the impact that can be achieved by highly transdisciplinary team science.

What makes us unique — at Feinberg and nationally — is that we are dedicated to leveraging the social and behavioral sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics, to conduct transdisciplinary science across the continuum of public health to transform health and healthcare equitably.

Our work broadly speaking, seeks to understand human behavior and health using the most rigorous methods from social and behavioral sciences. We use a suite of multi-methods, including quantitative and qualitative analytic methods, to investigate questions of interest. MSS has four divisions mapped on to the four steps of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approach to public health:

• In the Division of Outcome and Measurement Science, our faculty improve health and healthcare through better measurement and evaluation. This maps on to the first step of the public health approach, which helps with problem identification and measurement.
• Second, our faculty in the Division of Determinants of Health elucidate the influence of social, developmental, biological and behavioral processes on health and disease, consistent with the second step of the public health approach to identify risk and protective factors.
• Third, our faculty in the Division of Intervention Science design, optimize and test interventions to improve health and prevent disease as outlined in the third step of the public health approach.
• Fourth, our scientists in the Division of Implementation Science implement evidence-based practices in health systems and communities by supporting behavior change within organizations and systems which represents the fourth step of the public health approach.

Across these divisions, we have four cross-cutting foci:

1. We put people, equity and impact at the center of our efforts.
2. We take a lifespan perspective working across many diseases and settings.
3. We prioritize community partnerships and translational approaches.
4. We recognize the central importance of social determinants of health and the value of promoting health and preventing diseases before they develop. 

The impactful and actionable work of our faculty is broad in focus, from prenatal to end-of-life, and across the diverse populations that make up our society. We also sponsor the Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes, one of the founding centers of the Institute for Public Health and Medicine. Medical Social Sciences faculty lead two Northwestern University institutes, the Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. 

Since our department was founded in 2009 by Chair Emeritus David Cella, PhD, the scope of our work and the number of faculty within the department have grown greatly. We see MSS as a bridge across entities, as evidenced by our collaborative relationships within Feinberg, Northwestern University, nationally and globally. 

Education

As we do for our research, the department has a collaborative approach to education. Our faculty members are involved in teaching across many specialties and we have an area of scholarly concentration dedicated to Medical Social Sciences within the medical school curriculum, including participation in the Health Sciences Integrated PhD Program (HSIP). Aaron Kaat, PhD, serves as Director of Educational Initiatives and Chris Rini, PhD, serves as Director of the Social Sciences & Health track in the HSIP program.  We look forward to continuing to grow our educational mission.  

Big Picture

We are grateful to Feinberg's leadership, particularly Eric G. Neilson, MD, vice president for Medical Affairs and Lewis Landsberg Dean, for recognizing the unique beneift of having a department dedicated to social and behavioral sciences. Given that human behavior is the final common pathway for realizing the potential of discovery in medicine, leveraging the power of social and behavioral sciences in biomedical research and clinical practice to ensure that individuals, clinicians, organizations, systems and communities benefit is paramount.  

Thank you for your interest in our work. Please contact us with your questions and comments.