Ethan Berke, MD, MPH

Ethan Berke

Ethan M. Berke is an Assistant Professor in Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, a researcher at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, an Investigator in the Cancer Control Research Program the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. He completed a BS degree in statistics at the University of Vermont, an MD degree at Albany Medical College, residency training in Family Medicine at the University of Washington, and an MPH in Epidemiology at the University of Washington. He has additional training in urban planning and spatial statistics and regularly collaborates with geographers, urban planners, and computer scientists. He teaches both graduate level and undergraduate courses in medical geography and spatial epidemiology, specializes in the study of the built environment’s effect on health conditions, and has reported on the effect of walkable neighborhoods on chronic health conditions in older adults. He has a particular interest in spatial epidemiology, and how modeling habitat and social disparities affects health outcomes.

Dr. Berke’s research demonstrates the importance of the built environment in a population’s health. Using individual-level neighborhood walkability as a measurement of the built environment, he has shown that increasing, objectively-measured, neighborhood walkability is associated with more physical activity and fewer depressive symptoms in older adults. In addition to his experience with spatial analysis and the use of geographic information systems, Dr. Berke regularly collaborates with computer scientists on the use of mobile computing and sensing in health. He has worked with colleagues at Intel Research Labs and Dartmouth College to objectively measure physical activity and location using a passive, mobile device, and is currently working on projects at Dartmouth to sense social interaction, physical activity, and behavior in older adults using sensors incorporated into smartphones.