PHR founding member, past board chair, and board member emeritus Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, who is the Center for a Livable Future Professor Emeritus at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and serves on the board of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project moderated a discussion on how social determinants of health contribute to food insecurity, the shortage of supplies reaching starving communities, the broken system of equity and distribution in U.S. food chain systems, and how the destruction of livelihoods will shape policies responding to food insecurity going forward.
Distinguished panelists
- Dr. Kofi Essel, also nationally recognized in the area of food insecurity, is assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, where he directs the Community/Urban Health Scholarly Concentration and the Clinical Public Health Summit on Obesity. He is also a community pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC.
- Dr. Hilary Seligman, a nationally recognized expert in food insecurity, is professor at the University of California San Francisco, with appointments in the departments of medicine and of epidemiology and biostatistics. She directs the Food Policy, Health, and Hunger Research Program at UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations and the CDC’s Nutrition and Obesity Policy, Research and Evaluation Network. She also serves as senior medical advisor for Feeding America.