Population Wellness Lab
The Population Wellness Lab, led by Dr. Christy Denckla, studies how adversity, including trauma, loss, and bereavement, affects mental health, physical health, and well-being. We are driven by the ultimate question: how do people adapt and recover from these adverse events? What is the difference between normal grief and pathological grief? How does loss shape our understanding of the world and ourselves? Ultimately, we aim to prevent trauma exposure as well as the subsequent cascade of physical and mental adverse effects at the population health level.
677 Huntington Avenue
Kresge Building, Room 706 Boston, MA 02115
Population Wellness
We seek to differentiate why some people experience psychopathology after bereavement or trauma, while others appear resistant to psychiatric burden, cognitive decline, and physical illness.
What we do
Our ultimate goal is to better understand the effects of loss and trauma on human health, which will help identify strategies to promote well-being from the cradle to the grave. We envision a world where state-of-the-art evidence informs population-level interventions that prevent downstream adverse health outcomes among all people. To this end, we study cognitive health and neurocognition as well as gene environment interplay, psychiatric risk, and physical health.
We have a global focus and deep interest in multicultural perspectives, sustaining collaborations and projects nationally and internationally in the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Nepal, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Ghana.
Post-traumatic psychopathology is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, despite the availability of clinical interventions. This is partly due to our current limited understanding of the biological, psychosocial, and environmental factors at the population level that interact to maintain or prevent post-traumatic psychopathology.
Our research addresses this limitation by conducting analyses in large, population-based cohorts with longitudinal, genetic, and prospective psychosocial data to identify the complex mechanisms that contribute to psychopathology.
The long-term goal of our work is to: 1) characterize modifiable factors that prevent worsening mental and physical health after bereavement and trauma, and 2) characterize broad population mental health perspectives from novel theoretical and conceptual perspectives.
Christy Denckla developed and leads the new course SBS 237: Grief, Loss, and Death: Population Mental Health Perspectives. The course fills a gap in public health curricula wherein students have few academic opportunities to engage with the profound themes of grief, loss, and death, even in the era of pandemics, climate change, and widening health disparities. This eight-week seminar-style course applies a population mental health perspective to grief, loss, and death in a self-reflective, supportive environment. Students acquire an understanding of core theories and empirical methods in population mental health, grief, loss, and death. This course meets the interdisciplinary concentration in two programs: Population Mental Health and Women, Gender, and Health.
Christy Denckla also teaches the course SBS 281: Research Methods in Social and Behavioral Sciences. This course equips students with the skills to critically evaluate social and behavioral research in public health. Students learn about the problems relevant to social and behavioral dimensions of public health and the methodologies used to address these issues.
A core mission of our research group is training and mentoring the next generation of creative scientists and practitioners. Christy Denckla’s primary mentees represent diverse identities and backgrounds across training stages, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual orientations.
She has mentored students in diversity-focused programs and fellowships, including the Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences (CURE) program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and the Yerby Fellowship.
Denckla also has mentored students in low- and middle-income settings as faculty for the HBNU Fogarty Global Health Fellowship program. This program connects high-potential global health researchers with innovative, mentored research opportunities to improve the health of low-resource populations worldwide.