CSDE Research Areas:
- Health of People and Populations
- Wellbeing of Families and Households
Sociologist, educator, and health services researcher Gavin Hougham is Co-Principal of ChicagoPhDs, a professional consultancy in the health care research and Japanese-English language services industry. He was recently Director of the Battelle Seattle Research Center in the Advanced Analytics and Health Research Division, where he provided scientific leadership and operational oversight of the West Coast regional office of Battelle Memorial Institute. Prior to his Battelle appointment, he was a medical sociologist and health services researcher on the medical school faculty at the University of Chicago. As Assistant Professor of Medicine and Deputy Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences (CHeSS), he maintained several lines of research in the areas of health services research, aging, cross-cultural Japanese gerontology, research ethics, informed consent with the cognitively impaired (Alzheimer’s Disease), and other aspects of improving the quality of medical care and the health of populations. He led or participated in several multi-disciplinary training programs, including the inaugural cohorts of a new cross-national health outcomes research training program for groups of visiting Kazakh mid-career academic physicians and administrators. Dr. Hougham has worked on new methods of trajectory or longitudinal data analysis in geriatric and hospitalized populations that use sequence pattern matching algorithms borrowed from informatics, computer science, and computational genomics. One recent paper from that work identified a discrete number of disease remission “pathways” for patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). He has recently also published on how artificial intelligence and other advanced computing technologies can help improve the health of older adults, and on the risks of social isolation among hospitalized older adults. Dr. Hougham trained at the University of Chicago in the Department of Sociology and earlier held health foundation appointments at the John A. Hartford Foundation (New York), and front line public health experience at the State of Wisconsin’s Division of Health (Milwaukee).