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Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, PhD

Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, PhD
Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, PhD

Faculty Highlight – Dr. Watanabe-Galloway currently teaches two courses: Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Health Information/Public Health Surveillance. She has been an academic advisor to 11 MPH students and served on 17 service learning/capstone committees. She has also served on dissertation committees for nine PhD students and mentored two MPH interns.

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway’s teaching philosophy is “The more we put in as faculty, the more we get out of our teaching and advising experience.”  Dr. Watanabe-Galloway finds it important for students to develop adequate scientific writing skills before they graduate. She encourages all MPH students to publish at least one paper as the primary author and publish more as co-authors. Publishing in peer-reviewed literature provides students an opportunity to integrate what they learned in class as well as disseminate study findings beyond the research group. Dr. Watanabe-Galloway’s teaching experience has been well-received by her students. She received the college’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2011.

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway’s research interests include disparities in cancer and in psychiatric service. Over the past decade, Dr. Watanabe-Galloway has worked with the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board (GPTCHB) and tribes in the Northern Plains region to build the public health infrastructure in the Northern Plains region and eliminate health disparities. “Mapping Pathways to a Healthier Future,” a five-year project funded by the US Department of Health, Office of Minority Health, is one project on which she collaborates with GPTCHB. Each year, a group of public health professionals from American Indian communities in the four-state region (South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa) participate in face-to-face workshops and webinars to learn Geographic Information System (GIS) and epidemiology software. The project is in its third year and has had participation from 15 of 18 tribal communities thus far. The project is a good example of academic-community collaboration to address health disparities through public health infrastructure building.

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway serves on two of the college’s Governing Faculty Committees, Research and Development, and Student Recruitment and Admissions. She chairs the subcommittee for the MPH program within the Department of Epidemiology. She is a member of the Nebraska Cancer Registry Advisory Committee and Northern Plains Tribal Epidemiology Center Advisory Committee.

Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, PhD, is an associate professor in the UNMC COPH Department of Epidemiology.

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