prof.dr. DS (Spencer) Moore Jr

Spencer Moore is Professor and Chair of the Health & Society Group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Spencer is also Affiliated Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior at the Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina and an Academic Affiliate in the McGill Centre for Convergence of Health and Economics at McGill University, Canada. From 2007-2014, he was Assistant and Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Spencer was awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award from 2007-2012 and an Ontario Early Research Award from 2008-2012. Spencer received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia and his Master of Public Health in Health Behavior/Health Education from the University of North Carolina.

Spencer’s research lies in the field of social epidemiology, population health, and evaluation/implementation research. In the field of social epidemiology and population health, his work examines the social determinants of health, with a particular focus on the effect that social relationships and social networks have on health conditions and behaviors. In this area, Spencer has led the Montreal Neighbourhood Networks and Healthy Aging Panel, which studies the influence of social capital and social environments on the health of Montreal adults. Studies from this panel have been published in numerous journals, including the American Journal of Public Health, Health & Place, International Journal of Epidemiology, and Social Science and Medicine. More recently in this area, Spencer has been examining the importance of social network resources in buffering the effects of chronic stress on health and aging.

In the field of evaluation and implementation research, Spencer applies social network analysis methods across the program implementation cycle to improve intervention effectiveness, equity, and sustainability. Of late, this has involved studying the social networks of rural farmers in India to assess whether the gains of a nutrition-sensitive intervention disproportionately benefited better connected village farmers. He is further interested in how systems thinking and approaches can be used to model and study complex interventions.