To our School of Medicine community,
On behalf of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, I am delighted to announce the appointment of Peter Hovmand as director of the Center for Community Health Integration.
Peter Hovmand, the Pamela B. Davis MD PhD Professor of Medicine, is an internationally recognized leader in developing and applying participatory methods in system dynamics and systems science in public health and medicine. He facilitates workshops and brings people together in different aspects of community health, including clinicians, therapists, social workers, patients and families to understand the systems and underlying issues and perspectives. The results are articulated through causal maps of the systems or formal computer simulation models to see a holistic view of the opportunities to identify leverage points for systems change.
Before coming to Case Western Reserve in 2020, Peter founded and led the Brown School’s Social System Design Lab at Washington University in St. Louis for 11 years. He authored Community-Based System Dynamics, led the creation of Scriptapedia—a knowledge common for group model-building scripts—and served as an associate editor for System Dynamics Review. To make it accessible to all stakeholders rather than only trained professionals, Peter pioneered the use of system dynamics computer modeling and simulations in community-based settings into Community-Based System Dynamics.
Peter is also a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering, a member of the Population and Cancer Prevention Program in the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and has secondary appointments in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences in the School of Medicine. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Ohio Department of Mental Health, Economic and Social Research Council United Kingdom and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He earned his MSW and PhD from Michigan State University.
The mission of the Center for Community Health Integration is to advance scientific understanding of the systems underlying health and health equity through strategic relationships and action. The center will be a home for collaborative research that advances community health and integrated, personalized healthcare. Center team members will work to develop a shared understanding of the effects of interactions between social, environmental and biomedical systems, and use that knowledge to improve the health of individuals, vulnerable populations and communities.
Building on three decades of work with partners in Cleveland and around the world, this new center is focused on making and reinforcing connections that challenge problems often perceived as intractable. It focuses on the connection between global health and topics crucial to local communities. The center’s team of experts has extensive experience with clinical care, clinical methods and modeling systems.
“I am excited to lead the center and plan for strategic growth in collaborations, faculty, new courses and opportunities for thoughtful systems change to improve health, outcomes and experiences for all, locally, regionally and internationally,” Hovmand shared. “System dynamics is a way of understanding change in complex systems and then tying it together into a shared model to facilitate systems change.”
Please join me in congratulating Peter as director of the Center for Community Health Integration.
Sincerely,
Stan Gerson, MD
Dean, CWRU School of Medicine
Director, National Center for Regenerative Medicine