Jason Corburn, PhD

Conversations on Urban Health - Dr Yonette Thomas

Dr. Jason Corburn is a member of the ISUH Board. He is committed to engaged scholarship, by which he means using research and academic resources to promote change, particularly social justice. He sees ISUH as a critical organization because it brings together people from around the world doing specific activities related to urban health. His joining the ISUH board has been a great opportunity for him to connect globally with a whole host of practitioners. Dr. Corburn likes the term “urban health influencer” and sees significant ways in which his work is influencing urban health. As an academic he runs the Center for Global Healthy Cities at UC Berkeley. The Center focuses on policy that facilitates changes in urban communities and neighborhoods – who benefits and how changes impact wellbeing. The second is building local collaborations and partnerships focused on reducing inequalities in urban neighborhoods and how people live. Focus on intra city work and those ways engaging the world around these issues. Professor Corburn views ISUH’s role in the context of his work as providing opportunities for bringing people together to dialog – likes the way the conference has evolved in bringing both researches and practitioners together – transdisciplinary activities focused on problem solving. Another area is rethinking education. We need a new set of practitioners for the 21st century city. The city is vastly changing, with new technologies, and increased inequalities and so we need to train people in new ways for dealing with these new challenges – preparing people to be change agents. Dr. Corburn sees the education workshop that he co-leads as being instrumental in helping to propel this change. The idea is that we want to think cross-culturally, different learning styles, different ways in which we can teach and train folks – focused on new ways to include the urban core and community members in cities who are the ones suffering the most around inequalities in cities. Three key things are being focused on: (1) developing a web-based platform where people can access different training; (2) bringing people together for training at each conference with a specific theme; and (3) figuring out how to bring this back to universities around the world to support education and training in urban health.