International Encyclopedia of Public Health

William Cockerham is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Previously, he was Director of the UAB Center for Social Medicine. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and has done post-graduate work at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include health-related lifestyle patterns in diverse populations. His journal articles include a widely-used theoretical model of health lifestyle behavior and among his several books is The Social Causes of Health and Disease (Polity, 2007) that is being released in a second edition in 2013. He has conducted health lifestyle research in the U.S., and also in Western and Eastern Europe, and the former states of the Soviet Union funded through various agencies, including the European Union’s Copernicus Project. He is the immediate past president of the Research Committee on Health Sociology of the International Sociological Association.

Stella Quah (Ph.D) is Adjunct Professor, Health Services and Systems Research Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, National University of Singapore. Her previous appointment was as Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore where she started her long academic career in 1972, initially at the Department of Community Medicine and Public Health and later on at the Department of Sociology. She was a Fulbright-Hays scholar from 1969 to 1971. Her research and professional activities include sabbaticals as Research Associate and Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California Berkeley (1986–87); the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University (1993–94); the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (1997); the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies, Stanford University (1997); the National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University (2002); and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University (2006). She was elected Chairperson of the Research Committee on Health Sociology of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the session 1990-1994; Vice-President for Research of ISA and Chairperson of the ISA Research Council for the session 1994-1998; and served as Associate Editor of International Sociology (1998–2004). As part of her current professional activities, Stella Quah serves in institutional review boards; and is member of international Editorial and Advisory Boards of several referee journals including the British Journal of Sociology and Sociology of Health and Illness. She has published extensively on health sociology, public policy and family sociology including the International Handbook of Sociology (London: Sage, 2000) edited with A. Sales and Families in Asia: Home and Kin (London: Routledge, 2008);. Among her publications on health sociology are “Crisis Prevention and Management during SARS Outbreak, Singapore”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10, 2: 364–368, 2004, with HP Lee; “Traditional Healing Systems and the Ethos of Science,” Social Science and Medicine, 57, 10:1997–2012, 2003; Crisis Preparedness: Asia and the Global Governance of Epidemics, ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Shorenstein APARC & Brookings Institution, 2007); “Public image and governance of epidemics: Comparing HIV/AIDS and SARS,” Health Policy, 80, 253–272, 2007; “Health and culture” in The New Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology (edited by W.C. Cockerham, 2010); and “Gender and the burden of disease in ten Asian countries”, Asia-Europe Journal, 8, 499-512, 2011.