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Collaborator Spotlight
Marie-Anne Rosemberg
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration? I want to look at the health and well being of at-risk workers, marginalized workers. They are primarily low wage women, individuals of color, and immigrants. These people are the ones who are living in different communities that are putting them at this disadvantage, who are most likely to experience poor health conditions because of all those other systemic factors that come into play, including workplace factors.
Cesar Higgins Tejera
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
What I’m trying to bring into the Landscape group is to better understand the relationship between biomarkers of inflammation and accelerated aging and their relation to cognitive decline in people exposed to structural racism.
Victoria Fisher
What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?
Not all epidemiologists study infectious diseases! I get asked a lot of questions about COVID-19. I don’t know anything about infectious diseases (from an epidemiological perspective), but I’ll happily talk to you about life course perspective and cumulative (dis)advantage!
John Dou
What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?
What I find most exciting is being allowed to study things I would not have had the creativity or knowledge to come up with on my own. Some interesting things I’ve looked at, including things like transcriptomics in sheep as a model organism or examining associations between segregation…
Ember McCoy
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
I think a lot of people see critical geography and social studies of science as more theoretical or “ivory tower” facing research. But I’m really passionate about emphasizing the need for scholars and the public to understand the socio-political dimensions…
David Cunningham
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
My research is rooted in the study of social movements, but with a focus on the systems of control that respond to those movements, by repressing or otherwise channeling activism to maintain the status quo. …
Jessica Faul
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
I am a co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and an epidemiologist by training. I am the person who is responsible for all the biological data collection that the HRS does, and I’m also a Co-director of the ISR biospecimen lab. I am also …
Dominique Sylvers
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
Overall, I study Black-White inequalities in health and aging. With the Landscapes collaboration, I will be examining how residential and educational segregation can lead to differences in accelerated aging between Black and White older adults. For my dissertation, I’ll specifically be looking at the ways in which…
Featured Publications
Evaluating Race in Air Pollution and Health Research: Race, PM2.5 Air Pollution Exposure, and Mortality as a Case Study
In this recent publication, Margaret T. Hicken, Devon Payne-Sturges, and Ember McCoy build on recent discussions in the epidemiology and environmental epidemiology literature more specifically, to provide a detailed discussion of the meaning of race, the race variables, and the cultural and structural racism that some argue are proxied by race variables.
Read more about Evaluating Race in Air Pollution and Health Research
Poster: Is Residential Racial Segregation Associated with Accelerated Epigenetic Aging?
At the 2022 University of Michigan Epidemiology Poster Session, Victoria Fisher presented preliminary results from her study of the association between residential racial segregation and accelerated epigenetic aging.
Linking History to Contemporary State-Sanctioned Slow Violence through Cultural and Structural Racism
In this recent publication, Margaret T. Hicken, Lewis Miles, Solome Haile, and Michael Esposito argue that the “slow violence” of environmental racism is linked to other forms of racial violence that have been enacted throughout history. This paper lays out many of the important themes of the research agenda of the Landscapes of Structural Racism and Health Lab:
“The first step in attempting to make lasting change toward equity is to develop an empirical literature that tests this general framework, linking history to the present through the common themes of cultural racism and the contemporaneous features of structural racism.”
Read more about Linking History to Contemporary State-Sanctioned Slow Violence