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Currently, population health science is an integral part of academic curricula around the world. For over a century, the principles of the reductionist paradigm have guided population health curricula, training, research, and action. Researchers continue to draw upon these principles when theorizing, conceptualizing, designing studies, analyzing, and devising interventions to tackle complex population health problems. However, unresolved impasses in delineating and managing pressing population health challenges have catalyzed calls for the integration of complex systems science–grounded theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches into population health science. Mounting evidence denotes that a complex systems paradigm can bring about dramatic, multipronged changes for education and training and lead to innovative research, interventions, and policies. Despite the large and untapped promise of complex systems, the haphazard knowledge base from which academics, researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners can draw has slowed their integration into the population health sciences. This volume fulfills this growing need by providing the knowledge base necessary to introduce a holistic complex systems paradigm in population health science. As such, it is the first comprehensive book in population health science that meaningfully integrates complex systems theory, methodology, modeling, computational simulation, and real-world applications, while incorporating current population health theoretical, methodological, and analytical perspectives. It is intended as a programmatic primer across a broad spectrum of population health stakeholders—from university professors and graduate students to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. This book also aims to provoke long-overdue discourse on the need for updated new curricula in the population health sciences.

As a country, the United States overinvests in medical care, often at the expense of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produce health. Indeed, the rise of medicine as a cornerstone of American life and culture has coincided with a social and political devaluation of factors demonstrated to mean more to one’s vitality than anything else—influences like where one lives, works, and plays; livable wages that create opportunity for healthy living; and gender and racial equity. As such, this book moves the conversation around American health toward matters of class, money, and culture. It highlights how the structural components of everyday life ultimately determine who gets to be healthy in today’s America. In doing so, it makes a case for reframing the political discourse on public health in less myopic, more effectual terms.