Dustin T. Duncan, ScD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he directs Columbia’s Spatial Epidemiology Lab and co-directs the department’s Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit. Read more
Dr. Duncan is an internationally recognized Social and Spatial Epidemiologist. His research broadly seeks to understand how social and contextual factors especially neighborhood characteristics influence population health, with a particular focus on HIV epidemiology and prevention and sleep epidemiology and promotion. Dr. Duncan’s intersectional research focuses on Black gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men and transgender women of color. His work appears in leading public health, epidemiology, medical, geography, criminology, demography, and psychology journals. Working in collaborations with scholars across the world, he has over 200 high-impact articles, book chapters and books (>100 first or senior-authored), and his research has appeared in major media outlets including U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. Dr. Duncan’s recent work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the HIV Prevention Trials Network, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation. He currently leads five NIH-funded R01 studies, as well as studies funded by other sources, and mentors K and other awards of junior scientists. Currently, he is on the editorial boards of Geospatial Health, the Journal of Urban Health, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and Transgender Health. His work also extends out of the research world and into classrooms through guest lectures across institutions and courses including “Assessing Neighborhoods in Epidemiology,” offered at Columbia University. He also co-teaches in the “CORE,” co-teaching the social determinants module. He has received several early career and distinguished scientific contribution, mentoring and leadership awards including from the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS). In 2020, he received the Mentor of the Year Award from Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Dr. Duncan has mentored numerous early-stage scientists, doctoral students, and post-docs who have gone on to attain positions at academic institutions and successfully complete for research funding, including NIH R01-level funding. He thus has a strong perspective on how to ensure junior researchers launch successful research careers. His mentoring and early career faculty career development and advancement work areas of focus include the role of positionality in mentoring relationships, leadership development, and wellness/burnout prevention, with particular emphasis on underrepresented faculty.