Flint is a national leader in community-based participatory research and has a long history of creating social justice change. In partnership with the Michigan State University Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health, Flint will continue to advocate for public health policy change locally, nationally, and internationally.
The Department employs nearly 200 high-performing faculty and staff with more than $182 million in federal research grants and other funding. To attract leading public health faculty to come to Flint, a core value to sustain this unprecedented growth includes building an infrastructure in full partnership with the Flint community.
To fully support and advance this mission, we announce the appointments of Kent Key as the associate chair for community-partnered departmental administration and Steve Ondersma as the associate chair for research.
Key and Ondersma assumed these new roles on June 1, 2024, under Jennifer Johnson, the department's founding Chair.
Key was involved in the development of the Division (now Department) of Public Health in Flint beginning in 2013. He was part of the search committee that hired Johnson as the first Flint faculty researcher in 2015. He joined Johnson in Flint as a faculty member in 2017. Key is a community-engaged research methodologist and a health disparities researcher focusing on urban populations. He currently led an NIH-funded study exploring the utilization of family health histories in the African American community. In addition to being an accomplished researcher, he is a national leader in community-partnered structures and methods. In his expanded departmental role, Key will lead community and Departmental conversations about how best to integrate the Flint community into departmental shared governance formally. Key has been charged with the important role of crystallizing our unique identity as a department co-created with the Flint community into an ongoing, formal infrastructure for shared governance.
His responsibilities include:
- Working with community partners to co-create a structure by which they formally co-lead the Department.
- Working with the Departmental faculty, staff, and leadership to enact and maintain this structure.
- Supporting the Social Determinants of Health and working to ensure that the Department is meeting its commitment to the community.
Ondersma is a C. S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health who joined the Department in 2020 and has been instrumental in building successful research teams. His research is focused on the promotion of maternal and child health and healthy birth outcomes using high-reach technology-delivered brief interventions. He has led multiple NIH and CDC studies focusing on the development, validation, and implementation of novel screening techniques and electronic/mobile (mHealth) interventions in healthcare settings. He is currently leading a confirmatory trial testing an electronic intervention for alcohol use in pregnancy, as well as a new project using a multi-level technology-driven intervention to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality. He is also the developer of the Computerized Intervention Authoring System, an NIH-funded, open-source, and non-commercial research resource allowing the development of sophisticated digital interventions without coding. In his extended role as associate chair for research, Ondersma will support the continuing expansion of departmental research, a crucial pillar of our academic community.
His responsibilities include:
- Creating infrastructures and processes to support and expand Departmental research while assisting faculty researchers with helpful connections for sustained growth.
- Working with the Chair to create a culture of joy at work and to address unmet faculty needs related to research.
- Guiding new research-focused faculty and coordinating training and mentoring in grant writing.
June 26, 2024
