Susan S. Gallagher

Professor Gallagher is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in the field of child and adolescent injury prevention and in building capacity in state and local health agencies. Before coming to Tufts as the Director of the MS Program in Health Communication, she was a Distinguished Scholar and Senior Scientist at the Education Development Center in Newton, MA.

She was the founding director of the Children's Safety Network National Injury and Violence Prevention Resource Center, co-founder of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and founding director of the injury prevention program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Ms Gallagher has served on many state and national advisory groups, is a past chair of the Injury Control and Emergency Health Services Section of the American Public Health Association, and served on the Institute of Medicine committee that produced Reducing the Burden of Injury.

In 2003, she was selected to be a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and worked for Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. Her portfolio included Global AIDS, TB and malaria, medical research (CDC, NIH, and DOD) and mental health issues. She assisted Senator Durbin in introducing a public health workforce bill to provide scholarships and loan repayment for individuals working in state and local health agencies and staffed hearings of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Sub Committee. Professor Gallagher was active in the promotion of the predecessor to the Garrett Lee Smith Suicide Prevention bill championed by Senator Dodd in CT. The GL Smith bill now provides funding for suicide prevention initiatives in state health agencies.

Recent teaching and training related activities include appointments at both the Harvard and Boston University Schools of Public Health; serving as associate editor of the international journal, Injury Prevention; serving as a content development specialist and trainer on program evaluation for the National Emergency Medical Services for Children Data Analysis Resource Center and for the Indian Health Services Professional Development Fellowship program; serving as a trainer and coach for multi organizational violence prevention teams as part of an intensive Institute at the University of North Carolina; providing training on effective communication with policy makers; and co-authoring Injury Prevention and Public Health: Practical Knowledge, Skills, and Strategies, a textbook for practitioners. For many years she taught in the Johns Hopkins Summer Institute on Injury Prevention.

She has led numerous research projects addressing risk factors, injuries and preventive interventions focused on traffic safety and on Latino populations. Recent projects include developing a strategic plan for a traffic safety research center in Spain, assessing the sustainability and visibility of injury and violence prevention programs in state health agencies, conducting an assessment of the US federal investment in global road safety in developing countries for an Institute of Medicine workshop, working as a policy and evaluation consultant in Australia for the University of New South Wales Injury Risk Management Research Center and the University of New South Wales Department of Health, serving as an evaluation consultant for the Suicide Prevention Program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, documenting the need for policies to reduce heat-related deaths to children in parked cars, and developing.strategies to improve external cause of injury coding in hospital discharge data.

Her most recent projects have focused on developing and evaluating community-based traffic safety programs for ethnic populations, improving traffic safety materials for that population, and creating guidelines for developing culturally competent traffic safety materials for Hispanics. She is nationally known for providing training on communicating effectively with policy makers.

In 2007 she was invited by the CDC to be part of a small workgroup of professionals to examine key issues in injury communications, identify common communication objectives, and explore possible collaborative strategies for shared approaches to communicating the injury prevention message. The purpose of the meeting was to lay the groundwork for a coordinated communications strategy that incorporates common communication objectives, overarching messages, and key concepts. As a result of this collaborative effort, test messages and approaches to communicate injury issues to priority audiences are being developed. The goal is to elevate the importance of injury in the minds of all Americans.

Other health communication related activities have involved the creation of Spanish language traffic safety materials Educación de seguridad en el tránsito (EST) [Education in Traffic Safety], a two-year project addressing the high rate of traffic-related injuries among native Spanish-speakers. The project was designed to foster the development of effective educational materials in Spanish. It was conducted by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) in Newton, Massachusetts with the support of three partners: the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety (AAAFTS), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society. The four project objectives: 1) to identify, collect, and describe existing traffic safety educational materials produced in Spanish; 2) to develop and refine best-practice guidelines for individuals/entities seeking to create/modify traffic safety educational materials for Spanish-speaking audiences; 3) to develop a "model" example of a culturally and linguistically appropriate traffic safety material in Spanish; 4) to disseminate project materials, relevant research, and products.

The EST project builds on research completed in Seated for Safety(SFS), a unique study of child passenger safety educational materials funded by AAAFTS. The SFS study found that most child passenger safety educational materials targeting lay audiences are not appropriate for diverse cultural groups, including native Spanish-speakers. Although 30% of compiled materials were available in Spanish, most had never been field-tested to determine their appropriateness for Spanish-speaking audiences. Further, most of the materials were simply a direct translation from English to Spanish, which rarely results in culturally appropriate educational materials.

Professor Gallagher is a frequent invited speaker at conferences and is well known for her dedication to improving the injury prevention capacity of state and local health agencies; improving the availability, quality and use of non fatal injury data for program planning and policy development; bridging the gap between research and practice; and integrating injury and violence prevention within the training of public health and medical professionals, and within routine services offered by state and local agencies. Since working in the U.S. Congress, she has broadened her policy interests to include global health issues.

In addition to her professional health work, she is a gallery artist with a focus on photography and on monoprinting.

Professor Gallagher received her Bachelors degree in Psychology at Simmons College, Boston and her Masters in Public Health from Boston University. She also has appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard University School of Public Health and in the Department of Socio-Behavioral Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health. She received additional training from the Emerson College Summer Institute on Social Marketing and Health Communication and Johns Hopkins Summer Institute on Educational Diagnosis and Evaluation in Public Health and Medical Care.