Complicating The Narrative

How does a medical doctor go from managing patients’ blood sugar and kidney failure to designing global health policy, and now to leading action on climate change?  Sandro Demaio joins Salma to discuss his career from working as a clinician to leading health and climate change work for the Western Pacific Region of the WHO. They explore the skills that transfer across his roles in medicine and pub...

How much of what you believe about health comes from your political identity and who you are listening to? Matt Motta joins Salma to explore how political identity shapes what people believe about health. They start by discussing vaccines, revisiting the story of how a Lyme disease vaccine for humans failed to be socially accepted after it launched in 1998, and then turn to why vaccines have becom...

Why does public health still struggle to be trusted both at home and abroad? Craig and Salma discuss the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has disappeared from the news but continues building up to be the largest outbreak in history.  They discuss Craig’s personal experience as an Ebola survivor in 2014, and analyze how Ebola, and other global health emergencies, ca...

When was the last time a health system asked people for what they needed? Margaret Kruk joins Salma to discuss health systems and one of their key components: the experience of patients. They start their conversation with an overview of the functions and components of a health system and highlight that, similar to other service industries, healthcare needs to function for the people it serves and...

In this last episode of the Building Better Ways of Knowing (BBWK) mini-series, Kumanan joins Salma to discuss knowledge systems and their articulations with public health practice in the global context. They begin the conversation by reflecting on knowledge systems, how they have privileged and excluded different forms of knowledge, and how they have lagged behind transformations across other dim...

Almost nothing about how the United States government funds health research was chosen. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) began with leftover penicillin money and a letter to medical school deans. The decision to fund projects rather than people came from a foundation protecting itself during the Depression. The paperwork came from a congressman who was annoyed in 1962. Michael Lauer spent n...

Sara and Darren join Salma to discuss Civic City’s community-first model. They start the conversation by exploring how Civic City uses knowledge, narrative, and design to co-create solutions with communities. To make this tangible, they delve into the Food City STL initiative, which started off by deep community listening and led to a city resolution declaring food as a human right. Pertaining to...

This episode is a re-run of the Ideas Matter podcast episode “The Future of Higher Education” hosted by Dean Sandro Galea—Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at WashU and Co-Director of the Building Better Ways of Knowing initiative—in conversation with Professor Mitchell Stevens. The original episode was released by Ideas Matter on May 26, 2026.   In this episode, Dean Galea and Dr. St...

How do values shape the actions and agenda of public health science?   Anya and Salma begin their conversation by discussing how values are inherently embedded in every decision that scientists make, but cannot be considered a contaminant of science, as they are an unavoidable part of how research is designed and conducted. To elaborate on this point, Anya explains the concept of inductive risk—th...

How and why have certain methods, topics, and assumptions been favored by public health throughout history, and how has that shaped the truths we know today? Merlin joins Salma to discuss how history provides the framework to understand how specific moments in time have shaped the research preferred by public health, illustrating that these priorities are not timeless but shift according to time-b...

What is the relevance of history, and individual stories, when framing current public health research and practice?   Rebecca and Salma discuss the role of population-level history, and individual stories, in public health as part of the active tools for framing and translating research and interventions. To illustrate this, they use a historical case from 18th century Bologna and show how authori...

This episode is a re-run of the Ideas Matter podcast episode “The Future of Science and the Replication Crisis” hosted by Dean Sandro Galea, Co-Director of the Building Better Ways of Knowing initiative, in conversation with Professor John Ioannidis. The original episode was released by Ideas Matter on May 19, 2026. This episode begins with a discussion of Dr. Ioannidis’ paper about how most resea...

What does it take to shift a public health narrative and are researchers ready when the moment comes?  Whitney and Salma start their conversation discussing Whitney’s move from obesity to gynecologic research, highlighting how gynecologic conditions and overall women’s midlife health are understudied, as well as how obesity narratives remain focused on the individual willpower, despite a strong bo...

Katherine Keyes joins Salma to discuss the strengths and limitations of epidemiology, beginning with the gap between what averages tell us about populations and what they fail to predict about individuals. They explore how that gap is a frequent source of public misunderstanding, how self-experimentation can mislead through placebo effects and confounding, and why public health needs to be more tr...

How can you engage in healthy and fruitful conversation with people who think differently? Brinda Adhikari joins Salma to discuss the importance of healthy disagreement and unpack how conversations between people who think differently can look like. Reflecting on Brinda’s experience in journalism and especially as co-host of “Why Should I Trust You?”—bringing together public health experts, physic...

What does it take to close the gap between evidence and action in public health? As part of the first episode of the Building Better Ways of Knowing mini-series, Alonzo Plough joins Salma to reflect on the inaugural convening of the initiative and to discuss the expectations for the project and future convenings. They discuss the mismatches between the evidence generated in academia and the knowle...

What would it take to build a public health knowledge system that is more pluralistic, reflexive, and oriented toward action?  The Building Better Ways of Knowing initiative was created by the Healthier Futures Lab at Washington University in St. Louis Bursky School of Public Health, in partnership with the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research and with support from the Robert Wood Johns...

When and how, if ever, can public health compromise individual autonomy to prioritize the population’s health?   Professor Justin Bernstein joins Salma to discuss the different types of autonomy and liberty, from an ethical and philosophical perspective. By discussing Justin's papers on Covid-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and soda taxes, they weigh when and how, if ever, individual autonomy can...

Why should we all be concerned about sea-level rise and its health impacts today, despite it seeming like a problem of the future? Dr. Kathryn Bowen and Dr. Jemilah Mahmood join Salma to discuss the recently launched Lancet Commission on Sea-Level Rise, Health, and Justice. They argue that sea-level rise is neither just a coastal nor a future problem, but a present-day public health issue — one al...

What happens when the global health architecture built over 80 years is changed drastically in 16 months and what should replace it? Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe is the Dr. Adolph & Margaret Berger Professor of Medicine and Population Health and the director of the Division of Health & Behavior in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. His research focuses on the pr...

How do public health institutions experiencing declining public trust go about becoming trustworthy again? Erin O'Malley is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science, a coalition of more than 90 organizations working to enhance public trust in health and science. With nearly two decades of experience in health policy, advocacy, and cross-sectoral partnership, Erin lea...

By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year who would still be alive if the United States had the mortality rates of other wealthy countries. What makes this even more unsettling is that it wasn't always this way. In the mid-twentieth century, Americans actually lived longer than their counterparts in other rich nations. Something changed, and it's been getting worse for ov...

This is a Purple Public Health Project episode. Dr. Itai Bavli is a Research Associate and lecturer at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, as well as the author of the Substack When Public Health Goes Wrong. His research focuses on developing a framework for understanding public health decisions and actions that have gone wrong and caused harm, wit...

Why does the US spend more on healthcare than other high-income countries and still have lower life expectancy? Dr. Jose Francisco Figueroa is an Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing Internist and Associate Physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. His r...

This is a revisit of an episode originally published in September 2025. How can we capture complex social phenomena impacting health in research? Dr. Maria Glymour, Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, has focused her research on the social factors influencing dementia and cognitive function in old age. Salma and Maria analyze the deme...