Michelle Garrison to head Purdue University Department of Public Health

Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) is pleased to announce Dr. Michelle Garrison as the next head of the Department of Public Health, effective July 1, 2022. She will be preceded by Dr. Amanda Seidl who has served as interim head since August 1, 2021, and will remain on faculty in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. 

Garrison joins Purdue University from the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health, where she currently serves as professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health and the associate director of the MPH/MS program with a joint appointment in the School of Medicine, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Prior to joining the UW faculty in 2011, she worked as a research scientist at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and as manager of the institute’s Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Econometrics and Programming Core in the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development. Since 2011, she has continued as a principal investigator within the center.

Garrison studies interactions between sleep, media use and physical activity and their effect on health, behavior and development. She develops family-centered and sustainable health behavior change interventions and studies the long-term impact of improved sleep on child and adolescent development as well as family health and functioning. As a health services researcher, Garrison also works with colleagues across a variety of clinical fields to help them conduct research on innovative and effective ways to improve the quality of healthcare. She holds an MPH and a PhD in epidemiology, both from the University of Washington School of Public Health. In 2005, she received a Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship from the University of Washington and was awarded an NIH Loan Repayment Award for Pediatric Research (initial award and renewals, 2009-2014). She has served in a variety of peer review capacities and has been associate editor of Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation since 2020 and a member of the journal’s editorial board since 2017. For the past 10 years, she has done ad hoc grant reviews for NIH and the Institute of Translational Health Sciences. Currently, she is a member of the Sleep Research Society, the Society for Behavior Sleep Medicine, the Society for Epidemiologic Research and the Cochrane Collaboration.