Faculty Profile: Douglas J. Wiebe, PhD, studies environmental effects on injury risk, focusing on new ways to measure risk and hard-to-detect outcomes
JUNE 8, 2006
Douglas J. Wiebe joined the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology and the CCEB as an Instructor of Epidemiology in 2002. Born in the US to Canadian parents and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, he earned a BA in psychology at the University of Calgary in Alberta and, after helping his team win a national collegiate volleyball championship in 1990, looked forward to competing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Those athletic dreams were dashed by a career-ending illness, which prompted Doug to look back at the academic portion of undergraduate experience before deciding on his future academic course.
His individualized psychology track had brought him into contact with child victims of abuse, including those who had been removed from their homes and were living in institutional settings. Concerned about the violence that such kids had experienced and the fact that so many had become perpetrators themselves, he pursued a master's degree in criminology. Finding research to be a place that he could channel the energy that had once gone into volleyball, he enrolled in doctoral studies at the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, where he received a PhD in 2000. There he took advantage of an interdisciplinary program, and reframed his research interests on violence and injury to consider how these occur as a function of the way people interact within the constraints of a given environment.
His dissertation work involved a national case-control study of the role of the environment in violence, and found a gun in the home to be a primary risk factor for homicide. The homicide risk associated with in-home guns is especially high for women, which Dr. Wiebe attributes to the "singular danger faced by women in abusive relationships." He published his results in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, given the clinical relevance of the Emergency Department (ED) as one of the few places in which domestic violence victims have contact with the healthcare system. Viewed from a public health perspective, visits to the ED provide an opportunity to identify individuals at risk as well as modifiable risk factors such as a gun in the home. This finding garnered national attention with coverage by The New York Times, and won student paper awards from both the American Public Health Association and the American Society of Criminology. Dr. Wiebe then pursued additional training in epidemiology and public health in a post-doctoral fellowship in violence prevention at the UCLA School of Public Health.
Since joining Penn from UCLA, Dr. Wiebe has been appointed as a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the Scholar in Residence and Epidemiologist at the Firearm & Injury Center at Penn (FICAP) in the Division of Traumatology and Surgical Critical Care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Faculty Associate at Penn's Institute for Urban Research. Just recently, he was named Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Senior Scholar in the CCEB.
FICAP has enabled Dr. Wiebe to connect with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and clinicians in an environment affording him mentorship and the resources conducive to establishing an independent line of research in the epidemiology of gunshot injury. For example, Dr. Wiebe was awarded pilot funding from FICAP, as well as from the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Program at Penn, and went on to obtain an R01 to assemble a multidisciplinary team to study what he describes as "the etiologically relevant induction period for gunshot injury." This is a case-control study that brings the expertise of faculty from six Penn schools (SOM, Nursing, Engineering and Applied Science, Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Policy and Practice, and the School of Design) and CHOP. The goal of the study is to measure the extent to which adolescents are exposed to risk and protective factors over the course of their daily activities, and to investigate the impact of exposure on the likelihood of being assaulted. This represents only the fourth-ever study of gunshot injury to be funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The third such NIH-funded study, on which Dr. Wiebe serves as a co-investigator, is run by CCEB Asst. Professor Charles Branas, PhD.
In addition to Dr. Wiebe's research interests in environmental risk factors for injury and the impact of daily routines on health-related behavior, other aspects of his work focus on intimate partner violence. Relevant to all areas of his work, the overarching themes or goals of his research are to identify innovative ways to measure environmental exposures and innovative ways to measure hard-to-detect outcomes, such as incidents of domestic violence. Regarding this topic, Dr. Wiebe led a team that just completed a pilot study to learn about what happens to victims of domestic violence after they receive treatment in the ED and are discharged from the hospital. The study tested an innovative protocol for the prospective follow-up of patients after treatment, and found that fully three-quarters of patients were retained and participated in follow-up surveys over the month following discharge from the ED. This study was funded by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn and, similar to much of Dr. Wiebe's other work, brought together an interdisciplinary team of investigators from the School of Nursing, the Department of Emergency Medicine, and the Division of Trauma. Dr. Wiebe also leads a study funded by the Center for Health Care Equity Research of the Veteran's Administration to examine suicide among American military veterans.
Dr. Wiebe is a member of the American College of Epidemiology, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, the International Society of Exposure Analysis, and the American Public Health Association, and serves on the Board of the Philadelphia chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. In addition, he serves as a reviewer for the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Journal of Public Health, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Injury Prevention, the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, The Journal of Trauma, Pediatrics, and Social Science & Medicine. During the last few years, Dr. Wiebe has spoken as an invited lecturer on firearm injury epidemiology and domestic violence at the University of Chicago, University of California-Irvine, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Harvard University, as well as at the National Institute of Justice. He is the primary author of articles published in the journals Annals of Emergency Medicine, Injury Prevention, and Accident Analysis & Prevention.
