Kaori Fujishiro

Kaori Fujishiro, PhD, is a Senior Research Epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a social epidemiologist in an agency dedicated to improving working people’s health, Kaori has done extensive research on the role work plays in creating health inequalities. Her position at NIOSH has afforded her a unique vantage point for seeing the great potential in linking population health science and occupational health science, two lines of research that so far have developed separately. Because work is governed by existing regulatory structures, research on health and health equity that focuses on work could produce directly actionable knowledge. This direction will be most fruitful if researchers examine the quality of work, not just the presence or absence of work, and interrogate how the quality of work is determined and distributed in society. Through her research, mentoring, and leadership opportunities, Kaori promotes the perspective of work as a structural determinant of health.