F. Hunter McGuire, MPH

I am a doctoral student in Public Health Sciences at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

My current research interests center on psychiatric epidemiology, LGBTQ health across the life course, and systems science methods.

• Psychiatric Epidemiology: My research primarily concerns the epidemiology and etiology of mental disorders. In particular, my current work focuses on identifying risk and protective factors associated with eating disorders and related body image concerns (e.g., muscle dysmorphia) with the goal of informing population-level prevention efforts and policy change.

• LGBTQ Health Across the Life Course: My work aims to promote health equity for LGBTQ people, who disproportionately experience adverse health outcomes. To achieve this end, I am interested in using longitudinal methods to identify intervention opportunities to prevent mental disorder development among LGBTQ people from youth to older age.

• Systems Science Methods: I use agent-based modeling and social network analysis to expand beyond traditional epidemiological methods by modeling complex systems of individual-environment interactions. My work seeks to identify multilevel drivers of health disparities across populations and understand the ecological context in which health behaviors and outcomes occur.

I currently serve as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Brown School's Center for Public Health Systems Science where I support projects concerning health policy dissemination/implementation and agent-based modeling of state mental health agency decision-making.

In addition to my research and teaching activities, I provide statistics and methodology support to graduate students through the Brown School's StatLab. I also lead a monthly journal club where we discuss current eating disorder research with a focus on epidemiology and public health approaches. If interested in joining, check out the Journal Club page!

I am a member of the Academy for Eating Disorders, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, and the American Public Health Association.