Adelphi University appoints Dr. Elizabeth Gross Cohn Director of the Center for Health Innovation

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Gayle Insler, has announced the appointment of Elizabeth Gross Cohn, Ph.D., R.N., as the Director of the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation (CHI). Dr. Cohn is returning to Adelphi after spending the last five years at Columbia University.

Elizabeth Cohn

“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Cohn back to Adelphi as Director of our Center for Health Innovation,” said Dr. Insler. “Her strong background in public health, research, community engagement, and community health will bring an intensity of focus to CHI.”

CHI’s mission is to bring together interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students from across the University to find innovative ways of creating a culture of health, community-by-community across Long Island. CHI’s research and practice will focuses on the core principles of whole community—understanding and meeting the needs of communities, engaging and empower all parts of the community, and strengthening what works well in communities on a daily basis, specifically addressing their social, educational, physical, emotional and economic health. In this way, CHI provides a foundation for creating a community partnerships and leadership—with the goal of meeting current and emergent healthcare needs.

“Adelphi University is a dynamic and vibrant institution seeking to improve health and healthcare in our communities,” Dr. Cohn said. “The Center for Health Innovation will accelerate that mission through translational research, community engagement and public-private partnerships to improve health across Long Island.”

Dr. Cohn, a Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Faculty Scholar, graduated from Columbia University and completed a summer fellowship and the National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health. At Columbia, Dr. Cohn was the founding director of the Diversity and Cultural Affairs at the School of Nursing, the Associate Director of the Community-Engagement Core of the NIH-funded Clinical and Translation Science Award, and the co-chair of the Patient-Centered Outcomes/Comparative Effectiveness Research Consortium, an interdisciplinary collaboration between New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University.

Dr. Cohn has current funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute for Neurologic Disease and Stroke, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is an appointed member of the New York State Minority Health and Health Equity Council, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and the New York Academy of Sciences. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, on National Public Radio, in Men’s Health and Esquire Magazine. 

As the director, Dr. Cohn will build on the last three years of growth since the establishment of CHI under the directional leadership of College of Nursing and Public Health Dean Patrick Coonan, ’78, Ed.D.  Dean Coonan will continue in his role as CHI Academic Director responsible for the associated academic programming central to CHI’s core mission.

More information about the Center for Health Innovation can be found at chi.adelphi.edu.