May 2019

Tyson H. Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and he is also the Director of the Center on Health & Society. He joined IAPHS in 2017. Learn more about Tyson on his website and follow him on twitter: @tysonbrown

Tell us a little about yourself, where are you from, where did you go to graduate school, what makes you jump out of bed each morning?

I’ve moved around a lot (25 times!) so I always struggle with the question of where I’m from, but I’ve enjoyed living in quite a few places including South Florida, Nashville and Durham. Since my first year of graduate school at UNC, I’ve been driven to study issues related to the patterns, drivers and mechanisms underlying social inequalities in health.

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

As an interdisciplinary population health scholar, my research aims to provide a better understanding of the who, when, and how questions regarding health inequality. By employing an intersectional approach to document how racial/ethnic stratification intersects with other forms of social inequality (e.g., gender and socioeconomic stratification), my work generates new insights into who is healthy and who is not in American society. By using longitudinal data, I show how health inequalities unfold across stages of the life course and across subgroups, to shed more light on when these inequalities develop, and become most (or least) prominent. By explicitly examining the role of an array of structural, socioeconomic and psychosocial factors, my work points to underlying candidate mechanisms of inequality (e.g., differential exposure to economic hardship and stressors), furthering our understanding of how these inequalities are produced and maintained, as well as how they can potentially be addressed.

Read More