Nationhood Lab engages in a variety of initiatives, from convenings and presentations to collaborations with partner organizations engaged in the protection of the American experiment.
Public Health and the American Nations research collaborative
Nationhood Lab has joined researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Minneapolis-based HealthPartners Institute to study regional differences in various indices of health via the American Nations model. In the first three years of this collaboration the core research team — Ross Arena from UIC, HealthPartners president Nico Pronk, and Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard — and their collaborators have published forty scientific papers in fifteen peer-reviewed journals: The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Nature’s Scientific Reports, Current Problems in Cardiology, Public Health, Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews, the American Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Health Promotion, the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention, PLOS One, the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, Public Health in Practice, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Assessment & Disease Monitoring, and the Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors. Their work has explored regional differences in obesity, diabetes, physical inactivity, sleep disturbances, disabilities, healthy dietary practices, oral health, arthritis, life expectancy, binge drinking, and the Social Vulnerability Index, as well as the overlap of physical inactivity to the density of church congregations, political behavior, and past legacies of slaveholding. They developed a new Lifestyle Health Index and applied it to show the interrelationship between voter participation and health outcomes at the U.S. county-level, subject of their commentary in The Lancet‘s regional journal for the western hemisphere.
Building on this work, in early 2025 they published a major paper laying on an ecosystem-style model for evaluating the relationship between culture and health outcomes using the American Nations model and mediated by the political and social determinants of health. A second paper, with Woodard as lead author, formally laid out the American Nations model for use by medical and public health researchers. Both papers appeared in a special issue of Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases on culture and health guest edited by Pronk and Arena. In subsequent papers in two other journals, the researchers tested the validity of the ecosystem model using artificial intelligence-driven statistical techniques, validating its predictive efficacy for mortality and health lifespan, for obesity and physical inactivity prevalence, and for county-level COVID-19 mortality. Thirteen additional researchers from UIC, HealthPartners, UCLA, the University of Washington, the University of Minnestora and the University of Wisconsin – Madison have been involved in one or another of the papers, including experts in rheumatology, dentistry, cardiology, population modeling and the political economy of health.
On the strength of this work, in late September 2023 Woodard presented the work of Nationhood Lab and the utility of the American Nations model at a meeting of the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering’s working group on obesity solutions. In 2025, he presented the work to the clinical staff of MaineHealth, Maine’s largest hospital and medical provider network, at the grand rounds of HealthPartners, Minnesota’s largest health network, and as the keynote lecturer at the annual meeting of the Maine Public Health Association. The full team came together for a confab and public lecture at the Pell Center in June 2026.
Additional research is underway and multiple papers are in-review that leverage the insights in American Nations to better understand and mitigate a wide range of regional health disparities in the United States.
Teaching and Debating United States National Narratives
For the past two years, Nationhood Lab has been engaged in a collaborative initiative to provide curricular support for the work of David R. McMahon, professor of history at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who uses American Nations, Union, American Character and Nationhood Lab’s data journalism in the classroom. McMahon is teaching and perfecting a history instructional unitentitled “The Problem of Union: A New National Story” which introduces students to debates over America’s origins and competing national myths, and engage them in an effort to create a new, more effective national narrative for the future. From this he also intends to create a deliberative, nonpartisan dialogue guide suitable for community conversations modeled on the National Issues Forums (NIFI) Issue Guides. McMahon’s work is eminently scalable, a task Nationhood Lab is assisting with.