Dr. Usama Bilal, an alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is the recipient of a 2018 Early Independence Award. The award is part of the NIH Director’s awards for High-Risk, High-Reward Research program.
The Early Independence Award supports outstanding junior scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive, and maturity to flourish independently launch independent research careers and bypass the traditional postdoctoral training period.
His primary research interest is the macrosocial determinants of health, with a specific interest in nutrition-related conditions and their upstream causes. Most of his work focuses on the role that city- and neighborhood-level dynamics have in generating disease, and the use of complexity methodologies to study the emergent properties of urban environments.
Dr. Bilal received his PhD from the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology in the spring of 2017. He was one of 11 being awarded an Early Independence Award. He currently is an assistant research professor in Drexel University’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics & Urban Health Collaborative.
His project description can be found here: The Health Consequences of Urban Scaling
Read more:
https://commonfund.nih.gov/earlyindependence/AwardRecipients