New Center, Interprofessional Education Welcome Leaders

In such a space, she says, “collaborative teams of researchers who want to make an impact can work with policymakers and communities to address emerging climate and health equity challenges.”

Kelly K. Baker PhD, director of the Center for Climate Change and Health Equity (CCCHE), arrives at UB with a focus on transdisciplinary research and the “big picture questions” that always involve a team of people working on them.

With Baker at the helm, the center will serve as a resource to UB, local community organizations, policymakers and global partners for climate and health research, education, and policy initiatives. It will also provide strategic support for transdisciplinary initiatives with strong potential to improve climate resiliency and health outcomes for people experiencing vulnerability and communities in Western New York and globally.

Baker approaches her work through the lens of “one health,” which is a way of designing health programs that benefit humans, animals and the environment. One health recognizes the deep and complex connections among human, animal and environmental health, and aims to address health challenges at their intersection. At its core is “bringing different disciplines together to work productively,” Baker explains.

The project on which she’s been co-principal investigator for the past five years exemplifies that approach. The Pathogen Transmission and Health Outcome Models of Enteric Disease (PATHOME) study is a one-health study of a complex disease system, funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty Institute. Through PATHOME, Baker and an extremely multidisciplinary team aim to lay the scientific groundwork for practical, community-based policies that prevent early childhood infectious diseases.

Michael Oldani, PhD, is the new executive director for interprofessional education (IPE) at UB, taking over from the university’s first IPE director, Patricia Ohtake, now retired. Oldani will also have a faculty appointment in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Oldani is a trained medical anthropologist, earning his PhD from Princeton University. His initial clinical ethnographic work, sponsored by a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Award, began in Manitoba, where he studied collaborative care teams and examined the racial prescription of psychotropics for Anglo and First Nation children with behavioral disorders.

He has conducted research that critically examines the impact of pharmaceutical sales and promotion on provider prescribing practices, changes in psychiatric practices during the pharmaceutical era, and medical and prescribing practices within vulnerable populations, such as the incarcerated mentally ill.

Oldani’s recent research has focused on collaborative deprescribing; the role of focused ethnography within interprofessional medical education; the impact of collaborative practice agreements on chronic disease management, such as type 2 diabetes; and medical entrepreneurship and the prescribing of ketamine.

His scholarly contributions include publications in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropology & Medicine, and the Journal of Interprofessional Care. In May 2023, he co-edited a special volume of the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics on “IPE and Innovation” with Erica Y. Chou, MD, from the Medical College of Wisconsin. His book, Tales from the Script, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.