The Department of Population and Public Health Sciences (DPPHS) in the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine is one of the nation’s premier institutions of population health and public health sciences, with a base of over 110 core faculty members and over 800 students, as well as over $50M in external funding for research. The department is building on current strengths to promote the transdisciplinary research and training needed to address today’s many pressing population health issues, including tobacco and substance use, pollution and climate change, health disparities with attention to race, sex, age, socioeconomic status and other relevant factors, and the risk factors that drive obesity, cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and other chronic diseases. The Department’s scholars recognize that these challenges are overlapping and interconnected in ways that demand coordinated and integrated evidence-based solutions that utilize big data and state-of...