When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1990s in Amman, Jordan, Hala Madanat’s family was devastated to discover they hadn’t caught it early enough to save her. Mammograms were not as common as they are now, and awareness about the importance of prevention and screening for cancer were not well known in the community.
Madanat was 19 and a student majoring in biology when her mother died. This led to an abiding interest in public health and the impact it can have, so she switched fields for her master’s.
“I realized that when you empower the woman, you empower the whole family,” said Madanat, director of the San Diego State University School of Public Health. “As public health professionals we can develop community engagement programs that empower families and entire communities.”
Her research focuses on addressing health disparities through community engagement. Madanat was selected for the 2020 Albert W. Johnson distinguished faculty award for her work on obesity prevention in underserved communities.
“I believe strongly in social justice and bridging the gap in health disparities,” Madanat said. “We need to look at how to translate scientific discoveries into impactful population health programs. Take the community health worker model—we know it works, but how do we execute it on a large scale to actually help change people’s behaviors?”
Madanat heads the evaluation of several National Institutes of Health funded grants, and is the lead principal investigator of the $12 million NCI-funded SDSU/UCSD Cancer Center Partnership.
It serves several purposes: advancing discovery in cancer research, reducing cancer health disparities in the region, and providing research opportunities for underrepresented minority students, with the aim of developing a pipeline of future researchers from diverse backgrounds.
Madanat also leads Communities Fighting COVID!, a $3 million contact tracing program funded by the San Diego County Health & Human Services Agency. The project focuses on underserved communities, with Black and Spanish-, Arabic- and Tagalog-speaking health workers trained to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
“What’s exciting about my work is that you’re building community relationships over the long term,” Madanat said. “We started out studying trends, then applied that to intervention programs, initially for obesity and cancer, and now for contact tracing. So it’s not ‘one and done.’ We continue to work with our communities on many aspects of their health and to address their immediate needs as they come up.”
San Diego’s Latinx community has been a major focus of the School of Public Health’s efforts for the past many years. Researchers will build on that experience and expand it to include the Black, Arab American, and Asian Pacific Islander communities in addressing health disparities.
“Our projects will keep shifting based on community identified needs, but our focus will always remain the same—reducing health disparities,” Madanat said.