May 19, 2021

Spotlight: Jenna van Draanen bridges disciplines in unique Nursing and Public Health faculty role

Dr. Jenna van Draanen, assistant professor at both the University of Washington School of Nursing and School of Public Health, is passionate about upstream interventions and addressing social determinants for health.

After receiving her M.P.H. from the University of Toronto, van Draanen worked as a research assistant and research coordinator, allowing her to learn more about the public health landscape and explore various research areas.

Among these experiences, she served as a research coordinator for a randomized control study on homelessness.

“It is rare to have experimental methods in this particular social science context,” van Draanen said. “I was introduced to participatory research and became interested in the interconnection between poverty, mental health, substance use and homelessness. These are issues that are intertwined for many people, yet we tend to study them in almost entire isolation.”

From this involvement, she recognized the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in research and realized the potential for applying research methods to the study of upstream preventation work related to addressing social determinants of health.

“I became very passionate about understanding some of those social influences on issues that are primarily treated in clinical spaces,” van Draanen said. “There are many opportunities to use research methods to design health interventions that can affect the health of the entire population.”

Van Draanen then pursued a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied community health sciences and methods of theory-informed data analysis.

Following her doctoral studies, van Draanen was invited as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In this role, she conducted a series of studies on income, peer work, material security and substance use at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use.

Through this work, van Draanen understood that she wanted to focus her research efforts on issues of socioeconomic marginalization, with attention to the interdisciplinary approaches to address co-occurring issues related to health challenges.

Since the conclusion of her postdoctoral fellowship, van Draanen has jointly served as assistant professor of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing at the UW School of Nursing and assistant professor of Health Services at the UW School of Public Health.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” van Draanen said. “I get the wonderful benefits of collaboration and get to support interdisciplinary work through developing relationships in both places. From my position, I get to act as a bridge between those internal UW spaces, between the School of Nursing and School of Public Health.”

In March of 2018, the Population Health Initiative announced it would support three new faculty positions that were to be jointly hired between two separate academic departments. The jointly appointed faculty are intended to promote innovative solutions to critical population health challenges.

As one of the three faculty positions supported by the initiative, van Draanen’s role is to develop population-level innovations for local early-childhood interventions.

“The Population Health Initiative has been quite visionary, setting guiding posts and pillars that I want to structure my program of research around,” van Draanen said. “The initiative has offered really great resources, helping make interdisciplinary collaborations happen and setting up the infrastructure for [my] joint appointment.”

One such example of van Draanen’s direct work in early-childhood interventions is her involvement in the Best Starts for Kids intervention program through Seattle-King County.

Best Starts for Kids was established under the King County Department of Community and Human Services, designed to strengthen families and communities to promote the healthy development of children. The program includes investment in familial development, community-based programs and supporting local communities through research-driven approaches.

Van Draanen started working with the Best Starts for Kids program this past fall. She serves as a liaison between the UW Department of Child, Family Population Health Nursing, Department of Health Services, stakeholders at Public Health – Seattle & King County.

“We’re designing studies that can start to look at some of the interventions within the Best Starts for Kids Initiative and use that data to generate information about population health solutions,” van Draanen said. “We’re tackling some really exciting research questions that will enhance health equity and deliver the best services to those who need it most.”

Through her role as a bridge hire between the two academic departments and her research work, van Draanen aims to cultivate further community engagement through interdisciplinary partnerships.

“In my experience, research studies that involve multi-disciplinary collaborators tackle profound questions in more nuanced ways,” van Draanen said. “If we’re going to tackle big problems, we need interdisciplinary collaborations that also include expertise from those with lived experience.”