Center Research
Center Research
Our Work
Led by a team of experienced faculty and staff, The Center is engaged in research and practice to help support stronger and more prepared local, state, national, and global health departments, agencies, and ministries of health.
2025
Exploring Preparedness Needs of Tribal Public Health Systems in Region VIII from Planning to Recovery
Region VIII is home to 32 Federally Recognized Tribes. They vary in size, geographic scope, and presence of emergency public health workforce and capabilities. Members of the tribes live on reservations, neighboring communities, and urban areas within the region. Tribal members and communities have unique public health needs and require an awareness and sensitivity to ensure productive and respectful engagement, respecting their sovereignty and self-determination. Evidence-based and evidence-informed strategies exist to foster respectful relationship-building with tribal nations and communities. A participatory approach can be utilized to ensure needs are mutually defined and prioritized, and roles and responsibilities are agreed upon for planning, response, and recovery phases.
Applying the Incident Command System (ICS) to Public Health
The Center began piloting its first intervention with Missoula Public Health in September 2025. The intervention will focuses on improving the ability of health departments to understand and effectively utilize the Incident Command System (ICS) during a public health emergency at the organizational level.
The need for this intervention was identified by the 2023/24 Coordinating Body and formally approved by the current Steering Committee for inclusion in the Regional Work Plan for the 2024 – 2029 period. Current ICS training is often difficult to translate into the public health realm which leads to confusion, improper use of ICS, and decisions to forgo its use altogether. In turn, this may cause problems down the line from a legal standpoint, when attempting to engage in post-emergency improvement processes, or when the LHD needs to stand up its own operations center or take part in a multi-sector emergency response with emergency management, EMS, and healthcare. Building upon previous training developed by Dr. Kimberley Shoaf, this training is designed to address to improve organizational-level understanding of the key tenets and structure of ICS and how to apply them in a public health setting.
The basis of the training is FEMA’s ICS 100, 200, 300, 400, 700, and 800 but has been adapted to build understanding of the underlying concepts of each within a public health context and using public health language in a way that the entire health department is more confident and capable of putting it into practice, not just the Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEP) team. The training includes both online asynchronous and in-person training, as well as a functional drill. A robust evaluation plan is also being developed to help The Center team make any necessary adjustments before rolling out the training to the whole region, as well as to build the evidence-base for public health preparedness and response efforts throughout the country.
It was such a pleasure working with Kimberley Shoaf's team from University of Utah's Rocky Mountains and High Plains Center for Emergency Public Health. Their training "Applying the Incident Command System to Public Health" was worth it's weight in gold! If you work in public health, you know how hard it is to get ICS training specifically tailored to our discipline's needs! Thank you again U of U friends, and we can't wait to work with you again!
National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH) Research Ecosystem
The Center for Emergency Public Health has been invited to join the Uniformed Service’s University’s National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH) Research Ecosystem. On behalf of the federal government, NCDMPH serves as an academic center of excellence in disaster medicine and public health, co-locating education and research in the related specialties of domestic medical preparedness and response, international health, international disaster and humanitarian medical assistance, and military medicine. The Center will serve as the primary point of contact for research tasking by the NCDMPH for a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the University of Utah that also includes the Forecasting and Surveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics Center (ForeSITE) and the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS).
The Center's members span from junior to senior academics that jointly hold decades worth of experience in the creation, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of disaster medicine and public health research. Previous work experience with the Department of Defense, EMS, the global health community, and the private sector facilitates their understanding of the spectrum of priorities and needs at play within the broader picture of disaster medicine and public health readiness. As a research organization, The Center understands the importance of evidence-based decision-making leading to effective and efficient operations both in the field and within existing systems. The inclusion of both ForeSITE and NEMSIS researchers, expands its capabilities to respond to both steady-state and surge Ecosystem tasking across a spectrum of research needs.
As a member of the NCDMPH Research Ecosystem, The Center may be tasked with research in the following areas: Public health and Preparedness, Disaster Medicine, Medical Surge Planning, Global Health, Health Surveillance, Health Systems Resilience, Disaster/Emergency Management, Occupational and Environmental Health, Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology, Modeling and Simulation, and Implementation Science.
Earthquake Casualty Modeling, Southern Turkey (Türkiye)
In July 2025, the Center collaborated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California Berkley, Hatay’s Mustafa Kemal University, and Gaziantep University in Turkey (Türkiye) on an interdisciplinary research project. This project connected civil engineering and disaster public health and medicine to advance earthquake casualty (e.g. injuries and deaths) modeling. Working together, we are focused on learning from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that occurred in southern Türkiye and northwest Syria on February 6, 2023. We will build on epidemiological methods to understand injuries and deaths due to earthquake, performance-based earthquake engineering and how structural or non-structural elements responded to the earthquake, and agent-based modeling to hone a new engineering framework to study earthquake casualties.
Assessing Public Health Capacity for Infectious Disease Modeling: A Qualitative Study of State and Local Agencies
Published with the Forecasting and Surveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics Center (ForeSITE) at the University of Utah.
Infectious disease modeling and forecasting tools are crucial for outbreak management. However, variability exists in the capacity of state and local health departments to effectively utilize these tools, influenced by factors such as infrastructure, funding, staff capacity, and data access. This study aims to identify the current priorities, needs, and capacities of state and local public health departments regarding infectious disease modeling and forecasting tools. Key informant interviews were conducted with epidemiologists, informaticists, and leadership across state and local health departments from Montana, Utah, and Washington. Thematic coding and axial coding were used for thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: (1) models and tools must be adaptable based on the jurisdiction type (rural, urban, state); (2) building trust in models and tools is an important precursor to adoption; and (3) there are concerns about the availability and quality of data. This study highlights the need for adaptable modeling tools that are tailored to specific public health jurisdictions. Building trust in modeling and forecasting tools and addressing data quality issues are essential for successful tool implementation and adoption across diverse public health settings (Crouch et al. 2025).
2024
PHEPR Region VIII Workplan
In response to ongoing public health emergencies throughout the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) planned to reestablish Centers for Public Health Preparedness (CPHP) as Centers for Public Health Preparedness and Response (CPHEPR) in Schools/Programs of public health among the 10 CDC regions. In preparation for this effort, they awarded several contracts designed to explore existing PHEPR capabilities and capacities, identify gaps, and then create 5-year work plans that include strategies and potential interventions for the identified focus areas.
2018
ESF-8 Coordination Toolkit
The Essential Support Function 8 (ESF-8) Coordination Toolkit is a product of the study “Making Disasters Less Disastrous”, a research project funded by the CDC which assessed the state of collaboration between groups responsible for public health and medical response to disasters. The overall purpose of this toolkit is to facilitate better collaboration between all entities involved in health and medical response (governmental, non-governmental, private, and public) before, during and after emergency events.
2015
School Absenteeism Surveillance Project
The Student Absentee Surveillance System (SASS) is an online absentee surveillance system designed for use by school districts and public health agencies. The system is optimized to process, analyze and display daily absentee data for a school district. The system not only displays absentee trends but also generates a range of different absentee warnings based on complex rules.
