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Collaborator Spotlight
Ben Culp
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.
David Rigby
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.
Reed DeAngelis
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.
Mike Esposito
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.
Aulia Dini Rafsanjani
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.
Ruiling Kang
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.
Tahlia Bragg
What’s the academic path that brought you to where you are now? Seeking and insisting that social justice and multiculturalism were at the core of all of my academic and professional pursuits.
Karis Hawkins
What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel? This research is about going deeper and combining a wealth of knowledge to understand and identify the root of the population health disparities we already know about.
Daekiara Smith-Ireland
How did you become interested in structural racism and health? Research on health among the black community is frequently limited, prejudiced, or out of date. This inspired me to pursue a career engaging people of color, dedicated to reducing the myriad racial inequities experienced in a variety of ways that negatively impact our health. Finding answers to this problem can aid in the more effective dismantling of structural racism among people of color.
Dayna Johnson
What’s one common misconception about sleep epidemiology that you’d like to dispel? Sleep itself is a complex construct which is actually challenging to measure, and involves bringing several methods to the table. The myth is thinking it’s just an one-dimensional concept that’s easy to classify.
Featured Publications
A national data set of historical US sundown towns for quantitative analysis
In this recent publication, David Rigby, Mike Esposito, Hedy Lee, David C. Van Riper, Margaret T. Hicken, and Stephen A . Berrey present a new national data set of historical sundown towns linked to contemporary spatial information.
A national data set of historical US sundown towns for quantitative analysis
Poster: A Life Course Approach to Neighborhood Segregation and Health among Black and White Americans
At the 2024 GSA annual meeting, Dr. Kayla Fike presented a poster on “A Life Course Approach to Neighborhood Segregation and Health among Black and White Americans”
Poster: Investigating Segregated Education & Trajectories of Muscle Strength among Black Middle and Older Adults by Gender
At the 2024 IAPHS annual meeting, Dominique Sylvers won the poster award for her poster “Investigating Segregated Education & Trajectories of Muscle Strength among Black Middle and Older Adults by Gender”
Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation and Monocyte DNA Methylation Age Acceleration
In this recent publication, Margaret T. Hicken, John Dou, Kiarri N. Kershaw, Yongmei Liu, Anjum Hajat, and Kelly M. Bakulski use the MESA study to suggest that neighborhood social context may be associated with an underlying biological age acceleration at the epigenomic level.
Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation and Monocyte DNA Methylation Age Acceleration
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