Joint Doctoral Program Student’s Journey Through Academia

Ben Schumacher is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program (JDP) in Public Health, Epidemiology at San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Ben attended a private, K-12 school in Chula Vista until obtaining his California High School Proficiency Exam Certificate at the end of 10th grade. In the fall of 2012, he became a full-time student at Southwestern College with the intent to pursue a degree in Human Biology. He then transferred to UCSD after receiving a full-ride scholarship through the Chancellor’s Associates Scholarship Program. While completing an internship at a local hospital in 2015, he realized that a career in medicine was not his calling, but he was passionate about the health and well-being of populations. After changing his major at the end of his junior year, he was in one of the first graduating classes of the Bachelor of Science in Public Health program at UCSD (class of 2016).

Ben’s current research, under the purview of Dr. Andrea LaCroix, focuses on physical activity in older adults. His dissertation, titled, “Developing, Validating, and Applying Measurements of Relative Intensity Activity in Older Adults from Observational Accelerometry Studies” seeks to shift the paradigm of scoring physical activity in aging populations. He summarized his work with the following example, “Imagine if I were walking with my grandma to our mailbox up the hill, at the end of the street. On an absolute scale, my grandma and I would be exerting nearly the same amount of energy; however, when we take into account my maximum capacity for exercise relative to hers, she’s exerting a much higher percentage of her maximal effort.” Through the application of modern machine-learning techniques, Ben is estimating the percent maximal effort in observational cohort studies to determine if this metric provides new insights about the relationship between physical activity and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality. Ben is scheduled to defend his dissertation in May 2022 and hopes to pursue a postdoctoral training program in aging epidemiology to help support his ultimate goal of becoming a professor.