How Research Influences Policy: The Evidence we Need to “speak truth to power”—A Reflection on an AAHE Scholar Address Three Decades on

ABSTRACT

Thirty years after expressing concerns about the translation and communication of science to the public and to policy makers, this reflection finds that the same issues face public health education perhaps even more urgently today with the advent of politicians who actively dispute science, and a public that has voted in support of their campaign promises to repeal and replace laws that provided health care and protection from global warming.

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AAHE Scholar Papers Introduction

Acknowledgments

I am indebted, as always, to Judith Ottoson, MPH, EdD, for support and inspiration in the chapters of my career chronicled in this review and the particular emphasis in the parts of that career begun in the 1980s with a growing and still abiding emphasis on translation, dissemination, and implementation issues from scientific evidence to policy and practice.