Lindsey Burnside

Postdoctoral Research Fellow & WorkLife Study Coordinator

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

I am a social psychologist by training, and I largely study how people cope with social stratification such as racism-related stress. So while my research areas are consistent with the broader themes of Landscapes, my unit of analysis has largely been individuals (rather than populations). I also spend a lot of time thinking about measurement and scale development.

What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?

Though it can be convenient to have a shared language within a discipline, I find interdisciplinary collaboration to be an especially considered and innovative approach to research. Plus, pressing issues affecting population health are of interest to many parties, including scholars across many fields–maintaining disciplinary silos is an artificial boundary.

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

Nothing came to mind, so I suppose the rumors are true (more likely, I’m just oblivious to the misconceptions).

How did you become interested in structural racism and health? 

In my late teens I spent a lot of time reading about hegemony, and especially 20th-century social movements that I felt were glossed over in my K-12 curricula. When I got to college, I had many courses related to the evolution of behavior, stress, and health. In one such course, I remember learning about Robert Sapolsky’s work on social hierarchy and stress in baboons: low ranking baboons were picked on and had less access to valuable resources. They also had shorter telomeres, higher cortisol levels, higher blood pressure and shorter lifespans. But when the hierarchy was upended by food poisoning, the culture of the troop shifted to be more egalitarian and health outcomes improved, too. Seeing the parallels between humans and another highly social primate species made something click into place for me, and I’ve been studying racism and health since.

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

I completed my Associate’s degree in psychology during high school, where I also became interested in organismal biology. I then earned my Bachelor’s in biopsychology, cognition and neuroscience from the University of Michigan. During undergrad and immediately after, I worked in psychophysiology and public health labs at the Institute for Social Research – the BioSocial Methods Collaborative and the Social Environment and Health Program. Most recently, I earned my PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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!)

How may I get more of my questions answered?