Tulane-Xavier MHIRT Program

Site 7 - Bangkok, Thailand

The Thailand site is a Wellcome Trust-funded demographic field station and has a number of panel studies underway related to fertility, mortality, environmental impacts of population growth and health outcomes and access to health care. Collaborative partners include Mahidol University and the Population Council.

U.S. Mentor
Mark VanLandingham, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of International Health and Development at Tulane University SPHTM. He is a social scientist with a special interest in the impact of migration and social upheaval on health issues, particularly HIV/AIDS. He has extensive overseas experience in Asia as both a scientific investigator and as a consultant and has worked in Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam.

Overseas Mentor
Sureepron "Tim" Punpuing, MD, is deputy director and a faculty member of Mahidol University's Institute for Population and Social Research. Her research focuses on population and environment interactions and migration studies.

Research Areas
Research projects include the development of a multidimensional assessment of young adult health for migrants and non-migrants in sending areas (Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand) and receiving areas (Kanchanaburi and Bangkok metropolitan areas). This assessment will include a standard assessment of overall health (the SF-36), mental health (a Thai depression scale), social integration (the Social Relations Scale), access to care (special module), workplace injuries (special module), reproductive health (special module), several physical measures (BMI, waist-hip ratio and blood pressure) and a qualitative module to assess special health problems related to migration. Other projects include providing an assessment of changes in various dimensions of health status over time for both migrants and non-migrants and providing an assessment of the degree to which differences between the health of migrants and non-migrants are due to migration processes, contextual factors in both rural and urban environments, family-level factors related to affluence and a priori individual differences related both to decisions to migrate and to various dimensions of health status.