Reed DeAngelis

Assistant Research Scientist
Reed DeAngelis

What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
I’m still brand new here, so I haven’t had time to identify my unique contribution to the team. But I’d like to think I’m halfway decent at figuring out how to measure aspects of complex social phenomena like structural racism, and how to link these phenomena to individual health processes.

What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?Few things excite me more than a new idea. And my favorite way to discover new ideas is to converse with other people who approach and interpret reality differently from me. Of course, the challenge of engaging in exchanges like these is to make sure I’m truly listening and comprehending what the other party is communicating. Likewise, in the context of interdisciplinary research, I have to learn the language and customs of many disciplines I’m not very familiar with. It’s a humbling experience. No matter how much I learn, I always feel like a novice or, at best, a “jack of all trades, master of none.”

What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?
That the notion of structural racism is grounded in “woke” ideology, and thus cannot be studied scientifically.

How did you become interested in structural racism and health?
In hindsight, it’s been a pretty long and winding road to get here. If I had to identify a catalyst that first sent me on this research trajectory, I would probably point to my early years as a touring musician. Traveling around the United States directly exposed me to many of the harsh realities of institutionalized segregation and concentrated disadvantage, pollution, and violence within minoritized communities.

What’s the academic path that brought you to where you are now?
 I guess I’ve always been interested in answering fundamental questions about human nature, like what makes life worth living or why there is so much evil and corruption in the world. But I changed majors so many times as an undergrad, trying to figure out how I wanted to approach these questions. For example, I started off as an English major in my first semester of community college. But I got bored with that pretty quickly and changed to psychology, then biology, philosophy, and, ultimately, sociology. I also dropped out of college at one point and served a brief stint at culinary school (I think somewhere between English and psychology).

If you had the opportunity to get one question answered by an omniscient being, what would you ask?
In this case, I’m going for the gold: Why is there something rather than nothing? Seems like an impossible question to answer, but maybe not for an omniscient being. Then again, I probably couldn’t comprehend the answer anyway.

Anything else you want to share?
It’s been a dream of mine to work at the ISR/SRC ever since I first started applying to graduate school programs. I’m just so thrilled and grateful to be here working with a team like Landscapes, with whom I share a similar ethos and vision of interdisciplinary research on structural racism and health.