Celebrating her 15th year at the Brown School, Sarah Moreland-Russell is at her upbeat and energetic best as she enjoys the most recent leg of a career expedition that has taken her to Kansas City, California, and St. Louis with a single professional goal: Making policy changes to improve public health.
An associate professor of practice based at the PRC, Moreland-Russell began her career in Kansas City in a six-year program she envisioned leading to a degree in medicine. But when she took a break to add a degree in public health, she found her true calling. “I knew public health policy was the important place to be,” she said. She left her med-school aspirations and worked as a practitioner at the Monterey, CA health department, then returned to her home state of Missouri to earn a PhD in public policy at St. Louis University, directing the university’s Institutional Review Board and then working with Professor Doug Luke.
When Luke and others from the SLU School of Public Health moved to Washington University, she joined them as a research assistant professor and later became associate director of the center Luke had founded on tobacco control. Intent on starting her own research portfolio, she got a sabbatical fellowship to Washington D.C. to work as an aide to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York; when she returned, PRC director Ross Brownson offered her a job as a faculty affiliate at the PRC. She was appointed as an assistant professor of practice and began work on research aimed at training to increase the capacity for sustainability in tobacco control programs.
Her research on that project concluded in 2023; it found that state programs in tobacco control could increase sustainability with training that involved stakeholders to develop action plans to build capacity. “We taught them how to do that, to engage stakeholders to develop a sustainability plan and track it over time,” she said, and added that she hopes the findings can be expanded to other areas of public health. She’s now awaiting funding for a new project aimed at the impact of changes to federal regulations on school food nutrition — and the potential for health inequities that result when local agencies decide to follow those rules.
Along with the rest of the PRC, Moreland-Russell has kind words for Brownson, whom she calls “one of a kind, the most amazing mentor I’ve had in my life.” Between him and the rest of the staff, she said, “you feel you’re inspired to do amazing work every day. “I believe in what the PRC does, to see policy as a tool to achieve better public health outcomes.” She’s also teaching Brown School students about policy. “I love teaching and the opportunity to be actively involved in the education of our students,” she said.
If that’s not enough, Moreland-Russell is also staying busy on the home front. She and her husband just built a new home in Sunset Hills for themselves and their four children. They had just started when the Covid pandemic hit, but they worked through the crisis. Do her new digs have a public-health feature? You bet.
“We built a workout gym, and we’re putting in a pool now,” she noted.