Assistant Professor
Dr. Mieka Smart is an Associate Professor in the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, with appointments in the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She is the director of the CHM Leadership in Medicine for the Underserved (LMU) certificate program. She is also the co-director of the Research to Reduce Disparities in Disease (R2D2) program, an NIH-funded, clinical research training program.
Dr. Smart leads a team that coordinates Service Learning and education abroad for CHM. Additionally, she promotes cross-cultural student and professional development via peer-to-peer experiential learning. Since 2011, more than 150 students and faculty have participated in her global public health topics courses. She has supported, led, and designed experiential education abroad programs in Uganda, South Africa, Belize, and the United States. She serves the African Studies Center, the Institute for Global Health, the Master of Public Health Program, and undergraduate medical studies at MSU.
Dr. Smart is the principal investigator of an alcohol policy evaluation and monitoring project in Uganda, a longitudinal study designed to provide practical evidence needed to inform policy interventions, enforcement strategies, and campaigns for compliance uptake. Her research interests include the prevention of mental illness and the use of systematic observations to monitor and evaluate public health policy interventions. She uses spatial and time series data analysis methods to understand the predictors and correlations of drug and alcohol problems. She earned a BA in public health and then an MHS and a DrPH in mental health at Johns Hopkins University. Her graduate studies allowed her to gain experience with geographic and time series data analysis methods, as well as generating large-scale longitudinal data via systematic social observation and merging publicly available data.
Selected Publications:
Smart, M. J., Mulheron, M., Nong, Y., Juarez, C., Blalock, E., Thorpe, R., Woodward, A. (2021). Understanding barriers and facilitators to genomic research participation among minority populations: A piloted community survey. Book chapter in press with Bristol University Press.
Smart, M. J., Mutebi, A., Mendoza, H., Milam, A., Tumwesigye, N. M. (2021). Evaluation of the district-level ban on sachet alcohol sales in Uganda. Manuscript in press at Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
Smart, M., Felton, J., Meghea, C., Buchalski, Z., Maschino, L., Sadler, R. (2021). Is a school’s neighborhood physical disorder related to its academic outcomes?. Child & Youth Care Forum, 50(2), 247-259.
Hines, C. J., Smart, M., DeLellis, N., Sprague, F. R., Furr-Holden, C. D. M. (2020). A novel method for evaluating and comparing community health reports. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education and Action, 14(3), 307-313.
Smart, M., Sadler, R., Harris, A., Buchalski, Z., Pearson, A., Furr-Holden, C. D. (2019). The population randomization observation process (PROP) assessment method: Using systematic habitation observations of street segments to establish household-level epidemiologic population samples. International Journal of Health Geographics, 18(1), 24.
Furr‐Holden, C. D. M., Nesoff, E. D., Nelson, V., Milam, A. J., Smart, M. J., Lacey, K., Thorpe, R. J., Leaf, P. J. (2018). Understanding the relationship between alcohol outlet density and life expectancy in Baltimore City: The role of community violence and community disadvantage. Journal of Community Psychology, 47(1), 63-75.
Smart, M. J., Yearwood, S., Hwang, S., Thorpe Jr., R. J., Furr-Holden, C. D. M. (2017). Impact of Maryland alcohol tax increase on U.S. college students’ alcohol-related outcomes. Substance Use and Misuse, 53(6), 1015-1020.
