ZURICH, Switzerland ‒ On August 13-16, 2019, Senior Researcher Nune Truzyan (MPH ‘03) from the Avedisian Onanian Center for Health Services Research and Development (CHSR) of the American University of Armenia (AUA) Turpanjian School of Public Health (SPH) was competitively selected to present at the 5th annual conference of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (ISEMPH). The conference was organized in partnership with the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and held in the main building of the University, a picturesque ancient building of the 19th century.
Attracting delegates from around the world, the ISEMPH 2019 aimed to foster communication among scientists, students, clinicians and public health professionals who want 
to use evolutionary insights to improve medical research and practice, and to use studies of human health and disease to advance evolutionary biology. Being profoundly interdisciplinary, it emphasizes the multiple interfaces between evolutionary biology and human health in the complementary fields of medicine, evolutionary biology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and epidemiology.
Truzyan presented a poster on “Lack of education might trigger multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis development in Armenia: knowledge evolution” co-authored by Varduhi Petrosyan. Truzyan was awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant to participate in the conference. The abstract is based on the findings from the “In-patient Tuberculosis (TB) Treatment in Armenia: Establishment of Continuous Quality Improvement System – a Needs Assessment” project, supported by the Armenian Medical Fund and the national data on 5-year (2012-2016) treatment outcomes for the pulmonary drug-susceptible TB patients.
The AUA Turpanjian School of Public Health works actively to improve population health and health services in Armenia and the region through interdisciplinary education and development of public health professionals to be leaders in public health, health services research and evaluation, and health care delivery and management.