We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Professor George A. Kaplan, our friend and Nova Institute’s Senior Advisor to the Scholars and Fellows Program, for receiving the Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Epidemiologic Research in recognition of his invaluable contributions to population health science and epidemiologic research.
George is a luminary of the field of social epidemiology whose work has included some of the early seminal research on population health and social determinants of health. Throughout his career, he has detailed the cumulative cost of socioeconomic disadvantage on health and functional outcomes in the elderly, the role of socioeconomic status and inequities on overall population health, neighborhood and community factors on health, and the role of economic and social policies on health, among other issue areas.
The “upstream” and “downstream” factors of health have been a consistent theme throughout his work as he sought to uncover the connections between “social divides” and “health divides.” As founder and Chair of the NIH-funded Network on Inequality, Complexity, and Health, he worked to connect researchers and complexity and systems science to more fully capture the many interconnected factors that contribute to health and health disparities. This was reported in his book, Growing Inequality: Bridging Complex Systems, Population Health, and Health Disparities (2017).
His work has been cited more than 60,000 times and he has been named a “Highly Cited Researcher” by the ISI. As advisor to the Nova Scholars and Fellows, George inspires and encourages others to connect the dots in pursuit of health equity.
