25-year-old Pinoy academic appointed managing editor of Harvard Public Health Review

A 25-year-old Filipino academic has been appointed as one of the managing editors of the Harvard Public Health Review (HPHR).

Jeconiah Louis Dreisbach landed a spot at the journal’s editorial board after sending a general application, he told GMA News Online.

“I took a shot thinking that if I get in, I will be assigned as an assistant editor as it is where the new successful applicants are usually assigned,” he said.

“However, the current editors-in-chief assigned me to the newly-established managing editorial team due to my experience,” he added.

Dreisbach said he is looking forward to working on topics that involve sociocultural and linguistic factors in health studies.

As an academic who specializes in linguistics, he said he would use the platform to highlight that language barriers can negatively affect the world’s COVID-19 problem.

He cited his work from the Journal of Public Health where it was stated that such barriers could bring patients’ life to danger for not being able to express their symptoms properly.

“Effective public health communication in a language that can be understood by laymen may help in mitigating the potential spread of diseases,” he said.

Dreisbach added that language can be a “powerful tool” for medical professionals to “communicate the importance of medical treatment to their patients.”

“It is a form of educating and countering misinformation regarding health crises,” he said.

He is concurrently serving as a managing editor of the journal “Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism,” associate editor for”Southeast Asian Media Studies” and editor for the “LLT Journal: A Journal on Language Teaching.”

Apart from that, he is also an assistant professor at the De La Salle University where he teaches courses in Philippine language, culture and media studies.

Moreover, he is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain where he is also a part of an interdisciplinary research group.

With these, he said the stint in HPHR will “probably (be) the most challenging editorial work that [he] will be taking part of” as he will also be adjusting to three time zones.

“We are currently reinventing the format of the journal. My background is in the traditional editorial setup, so I am still adjusting,” he said.

As managing editor, Dreisbach is tasked to “help in processing the significant increase in submissions from public health researchers globally.”

Among the journals he has been able to contribute to include the “Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health” and the “Studies in English Language and Education.” —JCB, GMA News