SPH Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Ella August

Dr. Ella August is a clinical associate professor of epidemiology, editor-in-chief of Pre-Publication Support Service (PREPSS), and a clinical associate professor of Global Public Health. Dr. August is currently a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Through her work at PREPSS, Dr. August supports and provides resources for researchers in Africa, Asia, and the Americas who hope to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. August’s research investigates how to effectively teach public health writing and strengthen capacity for research publications. Her main area of research are pedagogical research that seeks to understand what the best way of teaching writing and publishing is. The research that she conducts is collaborative with different teams and the work she does directly informs how she structures the mentor-mentee relationships at PREPSS. 

Dr. Ella August initially decided to pursue a degree in human nutrition. However, she ran into some reservations regarding the state which the field was in at the time. She stated that “most of the health advice we gave people at the time was very focused on encouraging individuals to adopt behaviors” and that this treatment style did not have much emphasis on explaining  “how the environment may be a barrier or how it may be leveraged to change these behaviors”. Following these reservations, she decided to pursue public health instead as she saw public health as a way to think more broadly about bolstering the health of populations instead of focusing merely on independent individuals. 

To this day, Dr. Ella August thinks about these kinds of things when working at PREPSS. The researchers that Dr. August trains at PREPSS are doing work on a variety of different topics. She believes that publishing the work these researchers produce not only helps the local people who are within the local community but also for the global health community at large. She is constantly thinking about how to bolster the health of large populations. She believes that our health in the US is connected to countries around the world as diseases spread and pandemics emerge and because our shared climate impacts all of us. That is why she believes that public health writing and research all over the world has the potential to benefit all individuals. Regardless of what part of the world that they live in. 

Initially, I had believed that public health research and writing stood apart from most biological research fields. However, after my discussion with Dr. August, while it is true that there are aspects of public health research and biological sciences research that makes them unique, I was also able to see how these seemingly disparate fields of research intersect and interact with one another. While biology is about living organisms and how they function, in public health research, you are able to zoom out and think about larger populations. “Public health is applied and focused on the health of large populations”. However, she also stated that “biology is basically a part of all public health research… they are all intertwined and public health really relies on biology along with a lot of other disciplines to be successful”. Following my discussion with Dr. August, I realized that public health is focused on larger populations and applications which inherently depend on strong biological research. Moreover, I was able to see how public health research intersects and intertwines with a multitude of other disciplines in order to be successful and make a large difference.

I was able to learn that the true power of public health research however, lies in the fact that public health is “very focused on prevention rather than the traditional focus on treatment and the fact that large scale interventions can be leveraged for major impacts on large groups of individuals”. The importance of public health research and writing is multifaceted. Dr. August believes that ‘Public health writing and research are really critical to get the word out to people about things like vaccinating their children and how they can be healthier and live a better life. But it’s  also really important to listen and facilitate communication. Public health communication is really a two way street”. While getting the word out about important research and work is critical, listening to what individuals have to say about particular issues and responding to criticism is also an important aspect of public health research. Dr. Ella states that “If you’re not aware or insensitive and actually responding to the public’s concern, you can really end up with a disconnect which could lead to distrust. And that's where a lot of the problems can start”. 

A major significance of public health projects is the fact that there is a potential to help a large group of individuals and apply policies and interventions which have the potential to prevent major diseases or illnesses from occurring. However, “there is a tension between pushing out research and recognizing that a level of certainty and amount of evidence must be achieved before moving forward to implement policies and applications of research”. While the end goal of many public health projects is application, “you have a responsibility to wait until you feel confident enough that your advice is reliable and sound. So that process of making sure that you produce reliable information is important”. 

While it is clear that public health research and writing is important, Dr. August brought to light some major flaws within the current research publication process. “One big problem is that there are just a few big publishers that are very wealthy and very powerful that dominate the publishing landscape. In addition, these publishers require researchers to pay to publish their work in addition to requiring them to pay to read work that other researchers have conducted. Moreover, “journals are making so much money and a lot of the labor comes voluntarily from faculty and researchers. Thus really tips the power balance between these very wealthy publishers and researchers who want to publish their work”. A lot of the researchers that Dr. August mentors through PREPSS are working in low income countries and simply cannot  read a large number of research journals because they do not have access to them and cannot afford to pay for them. In addition, Dr. August mentioned that “there is a documented geographic bias in publishing with researchers from low income countries being sort of underrepresented in the academic literature”. These problems have slowly been improved over the years. However, there is more work which must be done and these existing problems are still problematic. 

Through my interview with Dr. August, I not only learned quite a bit about the publishing process, but am now able to truly recognize the importance of accurate and informative public health research and writing. Public health research has the power to make a significant difference to a wide variety of individuals and publishing informed research is crucial.