Darrell Gaskin, Ph.D.
Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Email: dgaskin1@jhu.edu
Media Contact: Alejandro Orengo, ao@jhu.edu or 410-614-5983
Expertise: Barriers to care for vulnerable populations; access to care for vulnerable populations, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health care, relationship between “place” and health care disparities, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in hospital care. Health care disparities, heath economics, minority health, hospital quality, safety net hospitals, access to care, residential segregation, community-based interventions, population health.
Paula A. Braveman, M.D., M.P.H.
Director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and a professor of family and community medicine at UCSF.
Email: braveman@fcm.ucsf.edu
Expertise: Measuring, understanding, and addressing socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities, particularly in maternal and infant health. During the 1990s she collaborated with World Health Organization staff in Geneva to develop a global initiative on equity in health and health care. She has been the Research Director for a national commission on the social determinants of health in the U.S. supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
James R. Dunn, Ph.D.
Department of Health, Aging and Society, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Email: jim.dunn@mcmaster.ca
Expertise: Socio-economic inequalities in health in urban areas. Current research includes studies of the effects of housing redevelopment on adult mental health and healthy child development, the health impacts of neighbourhood-based redevelopment strategies, the effects of subsidized housing on adult mental health and healthy child development and the effects of the built environment on physical activity.
Arvin Garg, M.D., M.P.H.
Department of Pediatrics, Division of General Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center
Email: arvin.garg@bmc.org
Media contact: Jenny Eriksen, jenny.eriksen@bmc.org, 617-638-6841.
Expertise: Confronting the social determinants of health as a medical caregiver using the “patient-centered medical home” model of care.
Anthony Iton, M.D., J.D., M.P.H.
Senior vice president of Healthy Communities, The California Endowment
Former director and County Health Officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department.
Media Contact: Jeff Okey, jokey@calendow.org, 213-928-8622.
Expertise: Addressing the root causes of health disparities in ethnic populations and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Jill Litt, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado at Denver
Email: Jill.Litt@ucdenver.edu
Telephone: 303-724-4402
Expertise: How the built environment and social forces interact to shape health and health disparities
Sir Michael Marmot
Professor at University College London
Director of the Institute of Health Equity
Email: m.marmot@ucl.ac.uk
Media contact: Felicity Porritt, senior media adviser, felicity.porritt@googlemail.com, phone: 44-7739419219
Expertise: One of the leading researchers on health inequalities; principal investigator of the famous Whitehall Studies of British civil servants; chaired the Commission on Social Determinants of Health set up by the World Health Organization in 2005; author of Status Syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy.
Rima Rudd, M.S.P.H., Sc.D.
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University
Email: rrudd@hsph.harvard.edu
Media contact: Todd Datz, 617-432-8413
Expertise: Health literacy, including barriers to health information, health programs, and health care; health disparities
Megan Sandel, M.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health, former pediatric medical director of Boston Healthcare for the Homeless program.
Email: megan.sandel@bmc.org
Expertise: The impact of housing on child health. She’s a co-author of the first national report on housing and child health (the DOC4Kids report), and co-principal investigator with Children’s HealthWatch. She’s worked with the Boston Public Health Commission and Massachusetts Department of Public Health to create links between housing inspection offices and the patient electronic medical record. And she bridges patients-to-policy work as Medical Director for the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.
David R. Williams, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Professor at Harvard University/Harvard School of Public Health & Department of African and African American Studies
Email: dwilliam@hsph.harvard.edu
Expertise: Social influences on physical and mental health, including race, racism, socioeconomic status, stress, health behaviors and religious involvement. Williams developed the Everyday Discrimination scale aimed at measuring perceived discrimination in health studies. He has served in various national public health roles, including positions with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute of Medicine, where he helped prepare the report “Unequal Treatment.” He currently directs the National Institutes of Health-funded Lung Cancer Disparities Center at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Cheri Wilson, M.A., M.H.S.
Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Contact: chwilson@jhsph.edu or 443-287-0305
Expertise: Cheri Wilson is the program director of the Culture-Quality-Collaborative at JHU. Her areas of expertise include: health disparities, minority health, cultural competency and language barriers.
Steven H. Woolf, M.D.
Director of the Center on Human Needs and a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond.
Email: swoolf@vcu.edu
Expertise: He was chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Understanding International Health Differences in High-Income Countries, and a member of the Center for the Advancement of Health’s board of trustees, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Public Health Strategies to Improve Health and on the IOM’s Interest Group on Health Disparities.