UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Stephen Kodish, associate professor of biobehavioral health and nutritional sciences at Penn State, received the 2024 Mid-Career Award in International Health from the American Public Health Association (APHA) at the association’s annual meeting in Minneapolis in late October.
The Mid-Career Award in International Health acknowledges both commitment to international health promotion over many years and creative contributions to the field, according to the APHA website.
“We have countless colleagues doing innovative, inspiring and impactful public health work throughout the world,” Kodish said. “So, to be recognized by my APHA international health peers means a lot.”
Kodish studies global nutrition, focusing on the approximate “one billion people who live on less than two dollars per day,” he said. His research focuses largely on malnutrition in humanitarian contexts, with a particular focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions for improving nutrition among vulnerable populations.
A new collaboration between the International Rescue Committee; Ministry of Health of Mali; the University of Sciences, Techniques, and Technologies Bamako in Mali; and Kodish, will design and assess behavioral strategies for most appropriately introducing nutritional supplements to enhance effectiveness of existing malnutrition treatments.
“After a child is treated for acute malnutrition in a country setting like Mali, where resources are low, they typically return to the same home environment where they became sick in the first place,” Kodish said. “This collaboration will test different intervention approaches to better support child health and nutrition after they leave a treatment facility, in effort to prevent acute malnutrition relapse in the same children.”
Kodish, his students, and collaborators have worked in at least 25 low- and middle-income countries in regions around the world, from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, to Latin America and Northern Africa. They have tackled a variety of health problems from maternal and newborn nutrition to how to plan and implement health services on a national scale.
“In public health and medicine, there are so many interventions that are efficacious — in other words, they work in controlled settings,” Kodish said. “Those same interventions are often much less effective once introduced into the real world where society, culture, politics, access, economics, insecurity and other factors come together. We are working to close that efficacy-effectiveness gap, specifically when addressing malnutrition in resource-constrained contexts, through implementation science approaches in support of governments.”