How did you become interested in social factors and health? My primary interests and professional endeavors are in health. Allopathic medicine is exceptional for acute care and even addressing chronic issues, but factors further upstream may have an equally if not more significant effect on our health. Social factors must be researched and understood in order for it to be addressed successfully.
What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?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.
How did you become interested in structural racism and health? 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 is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration? I contribute to some of the trouble-making towards our methodological approaches—essentially challenging and refining our methods.
What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration? Working on interdisciplinary projects also broadens my understanding of how other people understand and tell the story from the data.
What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel? We’re diving into sampling, doing database gymnastics, debugging collection processes… It’s like we’re wearing multiple hats, from engineering to social science and even user experience testing.