February 2020

Christy L. Erving is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. They joined IAPHS in 2015. Learn more about Christy on her website and follow her on twitter: @ChristyLErving

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 was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Hispanic Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas, I attended graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. After completing my graduate studies, I had the amazing opportunity to work for two years at University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar. I enjoy the multifaceted nature of the work that I do as an academic, so some days I’m motivated to deliver a lecture to my undergraduate students, while other days I’m excited to re-engage with a research paper I’ve been working on, or meeting with doctoral students to discuss their intellectual ideas and curiosities.

How do you define yourself as a population health professional?

As a whole my research employs quantitative methods to explore how race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and gender interact to produce differentials in a variety of health outcomes. I am formally trained as a sociologist, with subfield emphases in medical sociology, mental health, race/ethnicity, and social psychology in particular. However, I began to expand my intellectual identity during my post-doc years at UW-Madison. Now, I certainly consider myself a population health scientist, and my work seeks to thoughtfully integrate a variety of disciplinary perspectives that will help us more comprehensively understand how social disparities in health are produced and maintained.

Read More