Member of the Month: Courtney Boen

Meet Courtney Boen, MPH, MA, PhD, Assistant Professor, Brown University

What brought you to IAPHS?

When I started my first tenure track position, Hedy Lee emailed me to ask if I was interested in joining IAPHS. I hadn’t heard of it yet, so I did a quick Google search. As soon as I read more about the organization, I knew it would be a “home” for me and my work. I was right.

What disciplines does your research fall under?

I’m a sociologist and demographer by training and identify primarily as a social demographer. My research aims to uncover the structural, social, and political drivers of population health, with particular focus on racialized, legal status, and socioeconomic patterns of health and mortality. In recent years, I’ve been especially concerned with the role of the U.S. criminal legal and crimmigration systems in shaping population health risks.

What other disciplines pique your interest? Are there additional disciplines you are interested in incorporating in your own research?

My work is highly interdisciplinary, and I draw heavily on (and learn a lot from!) research in social epidemiology, economics, political science, and public policy. I also use a lot of biomarker data in my research and have learned a lot from biologists and psychologists who study stress and aging. My current collaborators include scientists from all corners of the “population health” field: sociologists, demographers, economists, physicians, computational social scientists, and public policy scholars. They have pushed the bounds of my thinking in immeasurable ways and made my work stronger and more policy relevant as a result.

What is your favorite thing about IAPHS?

The group is committed to supporting rigorous science that has real-world impact. When I go to the annual conference, I have a hard time choosing between sessions, which is a reflection of the high-quality work being shared there. I also appreciate that IAPHS is truly interdisciplinary.

Will you be at the conference this year?

Yes! I look forward to the conference every year. This year I will be moderating a session on “DuBoisian Population Health: Matching Theory, Method, and Action.” I am hyped to be a part of this conversation with such incredible scholars from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, demography, and social epidemiology

What are you planning to do in the future? Goals for the next five years?

I have so many aspirations for the next five years, so my first goal will be to figure out which of them are priorities! In terms of research, I aim to do more research with political relevance. I want my research to reach a broader audience and engage more with political stakeholders. On the home front, I look forward to watching my two kids grow into amazing humans.

What do you do for fun?

I love to go to the beach, especially in the late afternoon and early evening, just to walk and hear the waves. Now that I live about a mile from the coast, I do it almost every day. I love drinking coffee and enjoy checking out new coffee shops when I travel. I used to do a lot more reading for fun before I had kids, but hope to return to my growing stack of nonfiction books in the near future.

What’s something that recently made you smile?

We just moved to New England from Philly, and I miss the city and my friends there a lot. A couple of weeks ago, a friend from my old neighborhood texted me on a Friday morning asking if he and his family could come visit for the weekend. As soon as I responded “yes!”, they hopped in the car, drove 7 hours, and arrived to our house by dinner. We laughed and smiled all weekend. Good friends are true gifts.

Do you have pets?

No, but when we moved to New England this summer, my partner and I promised our kids we would get a dog. They have been reminding us of this commitment daily. So it’s coming.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever heard?

When I think about what research projects I want to do next, I always think back to advice from a mentor: “Center your research on the world, and not on the literature.” Many of us were trained to read the literature for “gaps” we could fill and proceed accordingly. While this can be a fruitful way of building a CV and an academic career, it doesn’t necessarily result in high-impact work. Centering my research on the world–and not (only) on the literature–helps me to prioritize projects that I think will have real-world impact.

I also often find myself struggling to grapple with all the violence, oppression, and hardship in the world, and that feels especially true recently. When I teach, I can feel my students struggling with it, too. I frequently come back to this quote by Howard Zinn and have shared it with many students: “An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time.To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however a small way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

If the readers want to reach you, what’s the best way to contact you? (website, email, social media, etc.)

I can be reached via email at domed@umich.edu, on Twitter: @domsylvers, or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiqueledwards/.