George W. Comstock Center for Public Health Research and Prevention

The Center for Public Health Law and Policy explores fascinating and emerging global and domestic issues in public health law, policy, and ethics. The center brings students together with leading scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to address critical challenges at the intersection of law, ethics, policy, and the public’s health. The center also hosts the Western Region Office of the Network for Public Health Law, supported primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The ACPPHR focuses on applied population, individual and health system research to improve the public health and wellbeing of global populations particularly its communities who are most in need.

Location information, now routinely collected with health data and obtainable from advancing technologies such as smart phones, tablets, and satellite-based products such as Google Earth, provide a gateway for researchers and practitioners to examine the role and harness the power of geography in public health. Coupled with the emerging field of spatial statistics, the analysis of this location-based data is developing new and novel directions for public health.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Law and the Public’s Health enhances the effectiveness and visibility of law as a tool to protect and promote the public’s health. Center faculty explore innovative uses of the law and conduct legal and empirical research in diverse areas related to public health, often working closely with policymakers and public health practitioners. The Center also engages in education, training, collaboration, dissemination of information and the translation of research findings, and serves as a resource for practical and scholarly information about public health law.

We investigate the impact of human rights abrogations on the health of populations and develop rights-based approaches to public health challenges. We endeavor to bring the tools of population-based sciences to bear on complex health and rights interactions. And we brings human rights law to bear on some of the great challenges to human dignity and public health, from exclusion of marginalized people from services to the protection of health workers in war to the prevention of torture.