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Thomas
A.
Glass
,
PhD

Associate
Thomas Glass

Departmental Affiliations

Affiliated

Center & Institute Affiliations

Contact Info

(410) 614-2632

Research Interests

social epidemiology, chronic disease epidemiology, aging, behavior and health, neighborhoods, cerebrovascular disease, disaster epidemiology, bioterrorism, obesity

Experiences & Accomplishments
Education
PhD
Duke University
1989
MA
Duke University
1986
BA
Denison University
1983
Overview

Dr. Glass is a social epidemiologist with broad interests in the role of social and behavioral factors in population health. He has conducted research on social support, social networks and social engagement and how they impact health and functioning in older adults. He has conducted intervention studies in older adults to improve functioning.  He is working to develop and test a new real-time data acquisition system to measure social, physical and cognitive function using sensors. Other recent work explores the characteristics of the built and social environments and how they impact a variety of health outcomes including obesity.  He is now exploring the use of systems science methods for understanding a variety of population-level health related processes including obesity and alcohol policy.  He is a core faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Global Obesity Prevention Center where he directs Project 1, a multilevel investigation of the determinants of childhood obesity in Pennsylvania.  He is a Senior Associate Member of the Center on Aging and Health.


He is involved in multiple roles in teaching.  He is co-director on the NIA funded Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging training grant.  He co-directs the Education and Training core of the U54 funded Global Obesity Prevention Center.  He is also coordinator of the advanced epidemiology methods sequence within the Department of Epidemiology.  He is faculty sponsor of the social epidemiology journal club and directs the Baltimore Neighborhood Research Consortium (www.jhsph.edu/bnrc) for the advancement of neighborhood research in the Baltimore area.

Honors & Awards

Brookdale National Fellow


Golden Apple Award, small class

Select Publications
Selected peer-reviewed publications, top 5, last 5 years
  • In press Glass TA, Bilal U. Are neighborhoods causal? Complications arising from the ‘stickiness’ of ZNA. Social Science and Medicine.
  • 2015 Nau C, Schwartz BS, Bandeen-Roche K, Liu A, Pollak J, Hirsch A, Bailey-Davis L, Glass TA. Community socioeconomic deprivation and obesity trajectories in children using electronic records. Obesity (Silver Spring) Vol. 23 (1) pp. 207-12.
  • 2014 Schwartz BS, Bailey-Davis L, Bandeen-Roche K, Pollak J, Hirsch AG, Nau C, Liu AY, Glass TA. Attention deficit disorder, stimulant use, and childhood body mass index trajectory. Pediatrics Vol. 133 (4) pp. 668-76.
  • 2013 Glass TA, Goodman SN, Hernán MA, Samet JM. Causal inference in public health. Annual Review of Public Health Vol. 34 pp. 61-75.
  • 2013 Glass TA. Social class and child health: Our complexity complex. in Families and Child Health. NS Landsdale, SM McHale and A Booth (eds.). New York:Springer Science. pp. 143-154.
Projects
EXACT - EXposure Assessment in Current Time
Causes and Interventions for Childhood Obesity: Innovative Systems Analysis
Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity