Reaching Upstream

Larry Wallack has spent his entire career looking upstream for the social determinants of health. Now, as the senior public health fellow for OHSU’s Bob and Charlee Moore Institute for Nutrition and Wellness, Wallack is reaching further back and further out to stem the trend of health disparities.

“Unless we link what’s going on downstream with what’s going on upstream, we’ll never get ahead of the game,” Wallack told an audience of more than 30 people at MIKE Program’s annual Our Community Gathering event on March 2. “Fundamentally, the distribution of health and disease in our society is not random.”

Wallack gave a talk for MIKE Program in recognition of National Kidney Month. The event was hosted by the Pastor Mark and Tamrah Knutson of St. Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland. Heirloom Bistro provided lunch.

Wallack is a leading public health authority and advocate, leading the effort to shape public policy and awareness in the developmental origins of health and disease. He recently joined the Moore Institute’s Director Kent Thornburg to speak before the 2014 session of the Oregon State Legislature, House Committee on Health Care on the developmental origins of health and disease.

The Moore Institute was established by a $25 million pledge from Bob and Charlee Moore, founders of Bob’s Red Mill, in partnership with OHSU to research how poor nutrition contributes to the rise of chronic diseases. MIKE Program Advisory Board Member Susan Bagby, MD, serves on the Steering Committee for the institute.

Prior to taking on his duties with the Moore Institute, Wallack served as Dean of the College of Urban Affairs at Portland State University; and as Professor of Public Health at the University of California, Berkley, where he was the founding director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group. Wallack was a founding senior fellow and first president of the Rockridge Institute, a California-based think tank, and a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

He is a member of the national Policy Consensus Initiative, the Praxis Project, the Oregon Health Improvement Plan Committee of the Oregon Health Policy Board; and has served on several committees with the Institute of Medicine.

Wallack is the principal author of News for Change: An Advocate’s Guide to Working with the Media; Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention; and co-editor of Mass Media and Public Health: Complexities and Conflicts.

His awards include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Innovator Award, the Distinguished Wellness Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and numerous other awards and recognition. He has appeared on CNN, the Today Show, Oprah, and in many other national media outlets.

Wallace graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Urban Studies from Franklin and Marshall College, earned a Master’s Degree at the University of Arizona; then earned a second Master’s Degree in Public Health and his Doctorate of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.