TODD BEAR joined the Pitt Public Health faculty as an assistant professor immediately upon earning his PhD in 2013. His primary research interest is the study of adversity, including child maltreatment and exposure to violence, and its effects on health over the lifespan. He utilizes a life-course perspective to study the behavioral and psychosocial pathways by which childhood adversity affects adolescent and adult health. Bear’s secondary research interests include the study of racial and socioeconomic health equity as it relates to access and health service utilization. He is codirector of the Evaluation Institute for Public Health in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences (BCHS) and supervises the Office of Health Survey Research. He has developed a highly rated class on survey research in public health, as well as a class in psychometrics for scale development, and he actively supervises student theses and dissertations and represents BCHS on a number of school committees.
Bear has grown the Evaluation Survey Unit well beyond expectation, giving it national prominence. He directs the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pennsylvania Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System (BRFSS), and for this effort alone his staff completes more than 9,000 telephone interviews annually. Bear has met the exacting standards of BRFSS so effectively that he was recruited to serve on the CDC advisory panel that supervises BRFSS nationally. Bear has applied these skills to two iterations of the Allegheny County Health Survey, a CDC-funded adolescent health survey, and a number of NIH-funded efforts from investigators across the University. He is currently fielding the statewide survey that the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services will use to assess the rollout of Medicaid Managed Long Term Care in the state.
Bear received his MPH and PhD in behavioral and community health sciences in 2007 and 2013, respectively, from Pitt Public Health.
2/23/2018