Grants/Gifts Profile: Rowe Family Foundation

Gift to the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion

The Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion received a $1,050,000 gift from the Rowe Family Foundation to fund two SMS pre-doctoral students to be named “The Rowe Family Fellows” for three years. Two inaugural fellows have been admitted to the department: Matthew Lee and Sonia Mendoza. The gift will also support two national conferences on innovation in health promotion research methods, bringing together leaders in the field to examine new methods of designing health promotion interventions, share ways to evaluate and disseminate research, explore the potential role of big data in health promotion efforts, and provide opportunities for collaboration and mentorship for early career faculty. This gift will assist the fulfillment of the Center’s mission to improve health promotion and health communication practices through research, education and service. Funding has been received for the period from July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2019. Read more about the Rowe Family Foundation gift here. 

Rowe Family Fellows

Matthew Lee

MPH, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University 

BA, Anthropology/English, Washington University

Matthew currently works at the NYCDOHMH, where he oversees 32 Ryan White funded agencies (hospitals, community organizations, correctional facilities and other health programs) who have been awarded contracts to carry out HIV care and treatment services to ensure technical quality and integrity. Matthew has been working at the NYCDOHMH providing technical assistance with the design, implementation, dissemination and scaling up of a Ryan White intervention that allows homeless and unstably housed people living with HIV/AIDS to receive an intensive one-year medical case management program. Prior to working at the NYCDOHMH, Matthew served as a research consultant to the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University. Matthew seeks to pursue his doctoral studies in SMS to integrate health communication, social epidemiology, policy translation and create sustainable public health promotion programs.

Sonia Mendoza

MA, Sociology, Columbia University

BA, Biological Sciences, Stanford University

Sonia is interested in how structures of inequality infiltrate the sensibility, resource base, and politics of biomedicine, especially in the study of substance abuse among Latino populations in the United States. During her time at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Sonia conducted ethnographic interviews with Latino families regarding the efficacy of a culturally-tailored adolescent obesity prevention study, and assessed the effects of food messages on children’s food choices and consumption through a classroom-based study. As a master’s student at Columbia, Sonia explored the effects of American acculturation among Latinos and the changes this brought to the sociocultural standing. Through the SMS doctoral program, Sonia aims to study the continued dominance of behavioral health approaches in light of the competing narrative of social determinants of health, using cases of interventions for and explanations of chronic disease among Latinos.