Alumnus Meshack Achore Wins Hofstra’s Stessin Prize

Congratulations to GHE Collab alumnus Dr. Meshack Achore, named the 2025–2026 recipient of Hofstra University’s Lawrence A. Stessin Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication. The award was announced by Charles G. Riordan, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and recognises the scholarly efforts of early career faculty.

From Queen’s to Hofstra

Meshack completed his PhD in 2022, in Kinesiology and Health Studies (Health Promotion stream) at Queen’s University. He came to it with a Master of Public Health from McGill University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Ghana, and worked with the World Bank as a research associate and consultant before moving into faculty work. He is now Assistant Professor of Population Health at Hofstra University’s School of Health Sciences, where he has also served as Faculty in Residence.

What his work is about

Meshack’s doctoral thesis, Coping with Water Insecurity in Urban Ghana: Health Implications and Intervention Outcomes During COVID-19, asked a deceptively simple question: what do households actually do when the water supply cannot be relied on, and what does that cost them?

The body of work that has followed treats water insecurity as a social and political condition rather than an engineering problem. Across a series of studies in urban Ghana he has shown that unequal access to safe water carries a measurable psycho-emotional toll on the people living with it, and that perceived unfairness in who gets water can translate into collective action — or fail to. His work has also examined how coping strategies at household level are patterned by income, tenure and geography, and what happens to those strategies when a public health emergency disrupts everything at once.

More recently he has turned to the intersection of water and social protection — how cash transfer and welfare programmes shape whether poor households can secure water at all. That thread runs directly back into current lab research: he is a co-author on Improving water security through social protection: Findings from a natural experiment with Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) Program, published this year in Social Science & Medicine alongside current lab members.

Across all of it the throughline is the one that animates this lab: health inequities are produced by the environments and systems people live inside, not by the choices they make within them.

Please join us in congratulating Meshack on this well-deserved recognition.

The award was originally announced by the Environment, Place & Health Equity Lab.