Skip to content

Wizdom Powell

Wizdom Powell is Director of the Health Disparities Institute and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at The University of Connecticut. Formerly, Dr. Powell spent over a decade at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health where she held a tenured appointment in the Department of Health Behavior and was Research Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Health Equity Research in the Department of Social Medicine. Her research on male health inequities appears in the American Journal of Public Health, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Behavioral Medicine, and Child Development. In 2011-2012, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as White House Fellow to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. In 2009, she gave invited testimony to the President’s Cancer Panel. Dr. Powell is an American Psychological Association (APA) Minority, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente Burch, Institute of African American Research, and Ford Foundation Fellow who received a Ph.D. (Clinical Psychology) and M.P.H. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She chairs the APA’s Workgroup on Health Disparities in Boys and Men and co-chairs the Health Committee for President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative in Durham County. Dr. Powell received the APA’s 2014 Distinguished Professional Service Award. In 2015, she received the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Outstanding Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty, a Bellagio Center academic writing residency from the Rockefeller Foundation, and was named an Aspen Institute Health Innovator Fellow.