The Policy, Place, and Population Health (P3H) Lab was established by Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat in 2018 to serve as an interdisciplinary research and training hub examining how places and their policies shape population health. Members of the Lab investigated how U.S. state and local environments affect people’s health and life expectancy, with particular attention to the populations and places where those effects are largest.
The Lab’s work centered on two lines of research, The first examined how U.S. state policies, and changes in those policies since the early 1980s, shaped population health, including differences across groups such as adults with lower levels of formal education. The second examined how local conditions — economic distress, social cohesion, and the characteristics of counties and neighborhoods — affected health care access, mental health, substance use, and mortality from alcohol, suicide, and drug overdoses. Much of this work focused on rural people and places and on health differences across the rural-urban continuum.
Alongside publishing in academic journals, the Lab translated its findings for the public and policymakers through research briefs, presentations to community groups and government officials, and engagement with the media.
The former P3H Lab served as one of the important foundations for the Maxwell School’s NIA-funded T32 training program in Policy, Place, Population Health, and Aging (P3HA). The P3HA program extends the Lab’s core questions to the study of aging and the life course, preparing the next generation of scholars to examine how policies and places shape health and longevity as Americans age.
P3H Lab Alumni
Jennifer Brooks
Kent Jason Cheng
Julene Kemp Cooney
Joshua Grove
Blakelee Kemp
Sarah Mawhorter
Nader Mehri
Mariah Brennan Nanni
Claire Pendergrast
Danielle Rhubart
Yue Sun
Nastassia Vaitsiakhovich
Xue Zhang