David Rehkopf

I am a social epidemiologist and serve as an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health. I joined the faculty at Stanford School of Medicine in 2011.

I am Director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. In this position, I am committed to making high-value data resources available to researchers across disciplines in order to better enable them to answer their most pressing clinical and population health questions.

My own research is focused on understanding the health implications of the myriad decisions that are made by corporations and governments every day - decisions that profoundly shape the social and economic worlds in which we live and work. While these changes are often invisible to us on a daily basis, these seemingly minor actions and decisions form structural nudges that can create better or worse health at a population level. My work demonstrates the health implications of corporate and governmental decisions that can give the public and policy makers evidence to support new strategies for promoting health and well-being. In all of his work, I have a focus on the implications of these exposures for health inequalities.

Since often policy and programmatic changes can take decades to influence health, my work also includes more basic research in understanding biological signals that may act as early warning signs of systemic disease, in particular accelerated aging. I examine how social and economic policy changes influence a range of early markers of disease and aging, with a particular recent focus on DNA methylation. I am supported by several grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to develop new more sensitive ways to understand the health implications of social and economic policy changes.