David Rigby

Assistant Research Scientist

What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?

I was lucky enough to be trained by folks in sociology that ask questions about the historical production of social environments. My interests revolve around historical racialization processes, and the production, over time, of a racialized social system in which individual exposure to hazards and resources are shaped by race and space. We don’t have great data and methods to answer questions about historical social processes, even in the U.S. Pursuing these questions involves looking at the ways that our data are limited, thinking about how well available data correspond to the concepts and processes we hope to understand, and working to improve the quality of the data available, and then analysis. Rather than bringing a new expertise, I feel like I am always working to develop the data or analytical skills and knowledge that will help answer the next question in front of me. I feel incredibly grateful to be a part of Landscapes! And I am looking forward to digging into the fascinating questions Landscapes is working on.

What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?

I love collaboration because sharing and discussing complementary ideas and skills strengthens the work of everyone involved and makes the research process more vital and social. It is an honor to be able to work with people that have expertise that relates to questions that interest and motivate me, but that come from a different perspective and bring different tools. Some models of academic research can be isolating and siloed. What a gift to be able to draw upon the training and experience of experts from other research disciplines to make progress on investigating questions of shared interest.

What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?

The way that people often talk about history and racial inequities is to maybe acknowledge a time long ago when racism was a problem, and a recent transition to a modern society in which race is unimportant. If and how our current social world is connected to our past is often unaddressed and not well understood. Even in academia, there is a discomfort with using quantitative methods to study questions related to race. I hope to contribute, here at Landscapes, to a body of research that uses quantitative analysis of interesting data to carefully estimate pathways and relationships between place-specific histories and contemporary outcomes. I want to understand these histories better, and I am excited about the possibilities here at Landscapes.

 How did you become interested in structural racism and health? 

I am pretty new to population health research. I became interested in structural racism because throughout my childhood it seemed as though subjection to state violence, like the invasion of Iraq, policing, and immigration enforcement were targeted racially. I began first working in community organizing around immigration. Then through sociology courses as an undergrad, I felt energized and relieved to find a set of perspectives and methods that we could use to investigate and understand our social world. During graduate school my interest in immigration, and historical racial violence and control was sharpened. I was lucky enough to work with Mike Esposito and Hedy Lee on shared projects that brought me into health research. Now here I am.

What’s the academic path that brought you to where you are now?

As a kid I wanted to study math and physics. I spent the first few years of undergrad in Oregon studying languages. I moved to the mountains of North Carolina to be near my grandfather. After a few years I continued undergrad. I took an introductory sociology course with Laura Vance, and I was hooked. I was lucky enough to be accepted to the sociology department at UNC Chapel Hill for graduate school. There I worked on historical racial violence and changing immigration politics in the US. I taught at Washington University in St. Louis for a few years before working as a postdoc with Hedy Lee at Duke. I am really excited to be here at Landscapes working on research questions that are close to my heart with people that are creative, skilled, and collaborative. This is a great place to be and an incredible opportunity to do interesting work.

If you had the opportunity to get one question answered by an omniscient being, what would you ask? (this is meant to be a lighthearted question–we’re trying to get to the heart of what you are most curious about, whether within your field of research or beyond! Feel free to think big!)

The biggest questions that I would want answered by an omniscient being are questions about the emergence of phenomena that I don’t have any of the skills to contribute to answering. What is the relationship between quantum processes and spacetime? How does the structure of reality emerge from chaotic and probabilistic processes that are described by quantum theory? How does consciousness emerge from biology?