Douglas Storey, PhD, MA, director of communication science and research at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, is being honored with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s 2021-22 Excellence in International Public Health Practice award.
“As we continue to grapple with COVID and ongoing public health challenges and inequities, public health practice work continues to be more important than ever and an integral part of our school’s impact on the health of the public here in Baltimore, across the nation, and the globe,” Dean Ellen J. MacKenzie said today in announcing the awards, which were given in four categories to faculty, staff and students.
Storey is being recognized as a key member of CCP’s KAP COVID-19 Dashboard team, which provided critical, influential and real time COVID-19 data and insights to the World Health Organization and other organizations to support communication and information dissemination across the world. That work, which began in 2020, has since been expanded upon as the COVID Behaviors Dashboard, which visualizes the results from a daily survey that has captured more than 100 million responses from more than 200 countries related to knowledge, attitudes and practices around COVID-19 and vaccine acceptance.
“I feel a little funny being singled out for this award because like so much of the CCP work I do, it relies on a lot of teamwork,” he says. The CCP team consists of Stella Babalola, PhD, Dominick Shattuck, PhD, Marla Shaivitz, Tuo-Yen Tseng, PhD, Samantha Tsang, PhD, Greg Rosen, and others.
The sheer volume of data is what makes the COVID Behaviors Dashboard work so valuable, Storey says: “These dashboards were critical in providing an overall understanding of how the pandemic affected the entire world, though in different ways in different countries.” Also key: The ability to provide public health practitioners around the world with a snapshot understanding of how their own citizens are being impacted by the pandemic – and how they can address prevention behaviors and attitudes.
“Having easy access to that kind of data is critical for public health globally,” he says.
Storey said he worked to keep the project grounded in communication theory, developing content to help people understand how to best analyze results in their own countries, and support evidence-based strategic decision-making.
Storey, an associate professor, has been at CCP for nearly 30 years and his work has spanned the globe, from Indonesia to Tanzania to Egypt to Baltimore, as he has led the design and management of more than 100 applied research projects since 1993. He is the author of dozens of peer-reviewed research papers and has written 16 book chapters.
