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RacismLab

Selena Ortiz, Tia Palermo, Muntasir Masum

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RacismLab

RacismLab is a transdisciplinary research collective that brings together doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty to develop innovative theoretical frameworks and empirical approaches to better understand the impact of racism on health and well-being at the University of Michigan.  In addition to regular working group meetings, the RacismLab convenes annual campus-wide events on the conceptualization and measurement of race and racism at the Institute for Social Research and participate in writing retreats.

Speakers

Shanice Battle is a PhD student in the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. She previously worked at the CDC, Morehouse School of Medicine and Emory School of Medicine on various research projects focusing on the prevention of HIV/AIDS, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disease and maternal substance abuse. Her current research focuses on mental health as a predictor of chronic illnesses in black women and the ways social supports or stressors can impact that relationship.

Lindsey Burnside is a PhD student in the Social-Personality area of the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of her previous work includes projects linking racial residential segregation to health disparities via epigenomic mechanisms, investigations of racism-related vigilance, and in-group expectations of social affirmation. Her research interests include health equity, racism-related stress, and integrative, person-centered, research methods. The ultimate goal of these interests is understanding how individuals promote the well-being of themselves and their communities in the face of hegemony.

Lewis Miles is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is primarily interested in racial, gender, and class inequities and inequalities across three distinct but often overlapping spheres: medicine, the environment, and global systems. Miles is a pre-doctoral social demography trainee at the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research. He is also affiliated with the Program for Research on Black Americans and the transdisciplinary RacismLab collective housed by the Social Environment and Health Program.

Maggie Hicken, PhD, is the Director of the RacismLab and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Dr. Hicken’s work examines the ways in which social forces link racial group membership to the risk of poor health, particularly those conditions related to cardiovascular and renal diseases. Throughout her research, Dr. Hicken grounds her approach to the study of race in the social sciences while integrating the biological sciences to ensure that the mechanisms examined are both socially and biologically plausible.

 

About the authors

Selena Ortiz
Selena Ortiz Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Administration & Demography at The Pennsylvania State University. She earned a BA in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, an MPH in health policy from the University of Arizona, and her PhD in health policy and health services from UCLA. Prior to her appointment at Penn State in 2015, Selena was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (Cohort 11) at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and a non-resident fellow at the ASH Center for Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her mixed-methods research focuses on the social determinants of health, health disparities, and processes related to health policy formation, implementation, and evaluation.

Muntasir Masum
Muntasir Masum Muntasir Masum is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Department of Demography (expected Spring 2021). Before starting his Ph.D. journey, he was working as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned his master’s degree from the Department of Sociology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research broadly focuses on the determinants of health and mortality, and the impact of health and public policies on different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and residence area groups in the United States and elsewhere. One of his current research projects examines how alcohol consumption behavior affects all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Tia Palermo
Tia Palermo Tia Palermo, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Her research examines the effects of social policy on population health. She was formerly a researcher at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti in Florence, Italy, where was actively engaged in facilitating evidence uptake in government decision-making. Previously, she also worked for Ipas. Tia holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an affiliate of the Transfer Project and a Faculty Fellow at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Global Health Equity, where she co-leads the Global Child Big Ideas Team.

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