Michael Long

Dr. Michael Long conducts research at the intersection of epidemiology, applied evaluation, and quantitative policy analysis with the goal of identifying cost-effective and politically-feasible solutions to promote school and community health.

Dr. Long is an expert in nutrition policy evaluation, with numerous publications on nutritional and obesity epidemiology, surveillance, and healthcare. As part of the CHOICES Project, he helped develop best-in-class obesity prevention policy simulation model and led analyses of fiscal, policy, and programmatic approaches to improving diet quality for youth and adults and is noted as an expert on food and beverage tax policy. Dr. Long led development of eating disorders prevention policy simulation model

Much of Dr. Long’s research efforts at GW have focused on integrating assessment of economic value into the evaluation work of colleagues. Dr. Long has provided cost-effectiveness methodology support for large cluster-randomized trials and quasi-experimental evaluations, including for a norms-based anemia prevention intervention, school telehealth program evaluation, social media-based COVID vaccine promotion, family planning access intervention for first time mothers, hypertension screening and treatment in conflict-affected communities, and currently, a youth violence prevention intervention in Washington, DC, (the District) led by Professor Mark Edberg.

In addition to a focus on cost-effectiveness, Dr. Long led the systems dynamics methods for a NSF-funded climate change and nutrition security project in Puerto Rico and a behavioral health priority-setting project in the District. He is currently using system dynamics methods to strengthen community understanding of the links between extreme heat, nutrition security, and health in the District and to identify innovative solutions to prevent heat-related illness. He is working on a longer-term project to develop a localizable school behavioral health agent-based simulation model capable of evaluating a range of interventions.

Dr. Long is focus on linking his research to his own community in the District and the broader DMV and to centering translation in his research agenda. Speaking to the moral blindness driving segregation and white supremacy in his sermon “Love in Action,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. argued, “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.” King’s sermon speaks very directly to the essential nature of practice in academic public health scholarship, education, and service. They conclude that love is the bridge between thinking and doing good.