Gina Lovasi

Gina S. Lovasi, PhD, MPH is the Urban Health Collaborative Co-Director and Dornsife Associate Professor of Urban Health at Drexel University.  Her research projects reflect a tension between loving to work with large datasets to chip away at big questions, and a fascination with the insights gained through field data collection to tackle local information needs.  In both contexts, the puzzles and surprises that emerge, either during the investigation or during subsequent dissemination, continue to provide a rich source of new research questions.  Her recent NIA-funded project is a longitudinal investigation of local retail (healthy food sources, physical activity venues, and medical facilities) and their implications for cardiovascular disparities and aging across the US.  She is also using street-level observations to understand variation in physical disorder within urban areas in the US and Latin America.  Dr. Lovasi teaches and mentors graduate students on using data to answer epidemiological and urban health questions, and serves as chair of the curriculum committee within the department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health.  She has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and recently co-edited the book Urban Public Health: A Research Toolkit for Practice and Impact (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Previous affiliations include University of California Los Angeles (undergraduate training), University of Washington (graduate training in epidemiology), and Columbia University (interdisciplinary postdoctoral training, assistant professorship in epidemiology).