Yale University

Mari Armstrong-Hough, M.P.H., Ph.D.

Roles:
  • Assistant Professor, NYU School of Global Public Health
Contact:

Biography:

Mari Armstrong-Hough is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences and in the Department of Epidemiology. Armstrong-Hough's research interests are at the social and epidemiologic interfaces among tuberculosis (TB), HIV, and non-communicable diseases. Combining training in epidemiology and sociology, her work informs and develops interventions to increase early case-finding, status awareness, and linkage to care in high-burden settings like Uganda and South Africa. She has published on predictors of evaluation for TB among high-risk groups, novel approaches to active case-finding for TB and HIV, the ways that providers and patients imagine and communicate risk for respiratory infection, and the availability of essential medicines in settings with double burdens of infectious and non-communicable disease. In addition, her first book, Biomedicalization and the Practice of Culture: Globalization and Type 2 Diabetes in the United States and Japan (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), examined how the practice and experience of global evidence-based medicine is shaped by local cultural repertoires.

Armstrong-Hough's current work focuses on active case-finding for TB, HIV, and diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa. One line of this research aims to elucidate how group processes within households shape testing behavior in settings where living with HIV or exposure to TB is common, and to develop interventions to increase uptake of testing by altering the architecture of home test offers. Her recent work has appeared in the Journal of AIDS, International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Public Health Action, and the Journal of Medical Internet Research. She also co-directs the NIH-funded Mixed-Methods Fellowship of the Pulmonary Complications of AIDS Research Training Program at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She is PI of a prospective cohort study of patients initiating treatment for pulmonary TB in Uganda and a co-investigator on NIH-funded studies of contact tracing for TB.

Before coming to NYU, Dr. Armstrong-Hough was an Associate Research Scientist in Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health. She previously taught at Davidson College, Meiji University in Tokyo, and Duke University. She earned her B.A. with majors in Sociology, History, and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, M.A. in East Asian studies from Duke University, Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University, and postdoctoral M.P.H. in Applied Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Yale. She has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Japan, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nepal and is a recipient of the Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie Patterson Trust Mentored Research Award in Clinical, Health Services and Policy Research.