Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the intersection of “place, race, and health” and examines the role of structural racism in shaping racial health inequities among Blacks in the United States and Brazil. Dr. Barber is a faculty member in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health and in May, was appointed by the Dean to be the Inaugural Director of the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity set to launch Fall 2021. Read more
Dr. Barber’s research and scholarly commentary has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, Lancet Infectious Disease, and Epidemiology and in February 2021, a profile of her research was featured in the Lancet. Over the past 5 years, she has served as Principal Investigator on several externally funded research projects and has secured over $3 million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Heart Association. Dr. Barber has also spoken nationally and internationally about the impact of racism on racial health inequities.
During the COVD-19 pandemic, Dr. Barber led a collaboration of researchers, graduate students and community partners from the Village of Arts and Humanities in the project COVID in Context, a data and storytelling project that documents how structural racism has contributed to racial inequities in COVID-19 and shapes the lived experiences of individuals and communities most harmed by the pandemic in Philadelphia. Dr. Barber has also provided expert commentary on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black communities in the U.S. for local, national, and international media outlets including the NY Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR and Al Jazeera. In March 2020, she convened a group of public health experts from Harvard (FXB Center for Health and Human Rights), UCLA (Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, and Health), and other academic institutions across the country to serve as an advisory committee to the Poor People’s Campaign, providing justice-centered public health expertise for the movement as it engaged in collective action and advocacy.
Dr. Barber received a Doctor of Science degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Master of Public Health from the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Bennett College. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Barber is committed to using her scholarship to make the invisible, visible; mobilize data for action; and contribute to the transnational dialogue around racism and health inequities.
