John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health

Racial, Ethnic and Socioeconomic Disparities in Health: Implications for Action Conference
April 29, 2004
National Press Club
Washington, DC

Contents:
a. Overview of meeting
b. Agenda (Powerpoints linked to presentation titles)
c. Conference speaker biosketches

Overview

Purpose and Format:
The purpose of this meeting was to increase understanding of the research examining relationships among socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and health; to encourage more research at this intersection; and to explore how to use what we know in policy and action.

The Problem:
Policy makers are increasingly concerned about the inequity of health disparities by race/ethnicity and SES. Yet knowing what to do about them remains a considerable challenge. Despite the importance of access to health care, especially for low income and minority populations, a growing body of knowledge suggests that action on more basic causes of illness is also needed to achieve the goal of eliminating health disparities.

Although race/ethnicity and SES are inextricably linked, most of the research on health disparities has looked at only one or the other. To inform policy, better data are needed on the joint and independent association of both race/ethnicity and SES on health and on the pathways by which race/ethnicity and SES affect health. These pathways operate across the lifespan starting with early childhood experiences. Given that race and ethnicity shape educational and occupational opportunities and resulting income and access to resources, policies that address these components of SES can help to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health. However, there may also be unique factors associated with racial/ethnic disparities and with socioeconomic disparities which require different policy solutions.

Policies to eliminate disparities must encompass more than just healthcare policy. Tax, fiscal and labor policies affect family security, job markets and the ability to purchase services. Housing policies impact on racial and economic segregation which together create increased concentration of social and physical problems, deteriorating housing and unsafe neighborhoods; these undermine health directly and constrain individuals’ abilities to engage in health-promoting behavior. Finally, education policies affect childhood exposures and opportunities and have life-long consequences for health.

Possible Solutions:
The message that health is influenced by so many disparate factors can be daunting for decision makers. Some fear that solutions will be impossibly costly. Those who create policy are themselves segregated by sector and turf, and may prefer single "silver bullet" solutions to complex problems. Yet there are some outstanding examples of work to improve health. Innovators are using evidence to change policies and practice at all levels. Sometimes those interventions are targeted at people of color; sometimes they are targeted at poor and low income individuals; sometimes on working families; sometimes on disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities. What works best, when and why?

Audience:
Health and policy researchers, decision makers and other stakeholders, including those from think tanks, foundations, community organizations, government funding agencies and the media are invited to attend.

Sponsors:

Aetna Foundation
For 150 years Aetna has helped people achieve health and financial security while working hard to be a leading corporate citizen. This includes support for America's most compelling social issues – urban revitalization, AIDS, immunization, cardiovascular disease, education and the ongoing need to listen to the voices of difference that shape our nation. Going forward, reducing the gap in health care among racial and ethnic populations will continue to be one of the most compelling targets for health care improvements in the United States and a focus for Aetna. Aetna and the Aetna Foundation are committed to continuing to build healthy communities. For more information, visit here.

Center for the Advancement of Health
The Center for the Advancement of Health is an independent nonprofit organization funded by foundations to promote greater recognition of how psychological, social, behavioral, economic and environmental factors influence health and illness. The Center advocates for the highest quality research and communicates it to the health care community and the public. The fundamental aim of the Center is to translate into policy and practice the growing body of evidence that can lead to improving and maintaining the health of individuals and the public. The Center receives core funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. For more information, visit here.

MacArthur Network on SES and Health
The mission of the Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health is to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which socioeconomic factors affect the health of individuals and their communities. The network's research agenda is designed to inform both policy and practice: to stimulate additional research in diverse fields, to contribute data to discussions of economic and social policy, and to provide a basis for social and medical interventions that will foster better health among individuals and communities.

Final Agenda

Conference Speakers

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, PhD, MPA-URP
Assistant Professor of Society, Human Development and Health
Harvard University
Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, PhD, MPA-URP, has a doctoral degree in public policy and demography (Princeton University, 1996). Since 1998, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health, Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the effect of social determinants (e.g. residential segregation, immigrant adaptation) on health disparities along racial and ethnic lines, the role of non-health policies (e.g. social policies, immigrant policies) in reducing those disparities, and the differential effect of public health policies (e.g. tobacco control policy) on various racial/ethnic groups. Her current research questions include investigation of the effects of residential segregation by race/ethnicity and by class on the large disparities in health outcomes that exist along racial/ethnic and class lines in United States, the role of assimilation and acculturation in shaping health outcomes among immigrants and the effects of immigrant policies on health outcomes among immigrants.

Nancy E. Adler, PhD
Professor of Medical Psychology;
Director, Center for Health and Community;
Vice Chair, Department of Psychiatry;
Chair, MacArthur Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health;
University of California, San Francisco
Nancy E. Adler, PhD, is Professor of Psychology, Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is also Vice Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Center for Health and Community. She did her undergraduate work at Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. After serving as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she came to the University of California, San Francisco to plan and initiate a graduate program in health psychology. She has served as director of that program, an NIMH-sponsored postdoctoral training program in "Psychology and Medicine: An Integrative Research Approach," and a new postdoctoral "Health and Society Scholars Program" funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Adler's earlier research examined the utility of decision models for understanding health behaviors, with particular focus on reproductive health. Her recent work is examining the pathways from socioeconomic status (SES) to health. As director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on SES and Health, she coordinates research spanning social, psychological and biological mechanisms by which SES influences health. Within the network she has focused on the role of subjective social status and has demonstrated its strength as a predictor of health status.

Paula Braveman, MD, MPH
Director, Center on Social Disparities in Health;
Professor of Family and Community Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
Paula Braveman, MD, MPH, is Professor of Family and Community Medicine and Director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco. A member of the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Braveman is nationally and internationally recognized for her research on social disparities in health and health care and her active leadership in bringing attention to this field, both in the U.S. and internationally. Her domestic research has focused on socioeoconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in maternal and infant health and health care, including work on the measurement of socioeconomic position. Her international contributions have included conceptual and methodologic work to inform the measurement of health and health care disparities, particularly in resource-poor countries. The Center on Social Disparities in Health at UCSF is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to conduct and disseminate research on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities.

Gary Burtless, PhD
John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies
Brookings Institution
Gary Burtless, PhD, holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He does research on issues associated with public budgets and deficits, labor markets, income distribution, poverty and inequality, U.S. and European social welfare programs, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government and transfer policy. Dr. Burtless graduated from Yale College in 1972 and earned a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. Before coming to Brookings in 1981, he served as an economist in the policy and evaluation offices of the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. He is co-author of "American Inequality and Its Consequences" in Agenda for the Nation (2003). He is also the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles and books on the economic effects of Social Security, public welfare, unemployment insurance and taxes. His recent research has focused on sources of growing wage and income inequality in the United States, the influence of international trade on income inequality, the job market prospects of public aid recipients, reform of social insurance in developing countries and formerly socialist economies, and the implications of privatizing the American Social Security system.

Congresswoman Donna M. Christensen, MD
U.S. House of Representatives
Delegate to Congress Donna M. Christensen, MD, is a Democrat representing the U.S. Virgin Islands in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is currently serving her fourth term in Congress. She has been the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus's Health Braintrust since the December 1998 retirement of Braintrust founder, the Honorable Louis Stokes. Congresswoman Christensen is commited to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in communities of color. Her work began with 29 years of service to the Virgin Islands community as a family physician and health administrator. She was the first female physician to serve in Congress. Under the leadership of Congressman Stokes and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congresswoman Christensen was part of the historic effort in 1998 to have $156 million appropriated specifically to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in African American communities. She continues to spearhead policy development to address health disparities on a legislative level, working with the Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander and Native American Caucuses to support and introduce legislation to address these issues. Congresswoman Christensen was named to the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, where she is a member of the Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness and Response, which oversees the security of the public health infrastructure. Congresswoman Christensen has received many national, regional and local awards for her work in health care, as well as on behalf of the Caribbean and her contributions to the well-being of her district.

Ana Diez-Roux, MD, MPH, PhD
Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine
University of Michigan
Ana Diez-Roux, MD, MPH, PhD, is an epidemiologist whose work has focused on the examination of the social determinants of health. Originally trained as a pediatrician in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she received an MPH and a PhD in Health Policy from the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where she was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology. She is currently Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Michigan. Dr. Diez-Roux's empirical work has focused on the social determinants of cardiovascular risk and on the examination of neighborhood effects on health. Her research interests and projects also include long-term exposure to airborne particulates and subclinical atherosclerosis and lifecourse SES, social context and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Diez-Roux has also published conceptual and methodological papers on multilevel analysis, on policy and epidemiology as it attempts to integrate population-level and individual-level determinants, as well as on social and biological factors in understanding the causes of disease.

Harold P. Freeman, MD
Associate Director,
National Cancer Institute
Director, Center to Reduce Health Disparities
National Cancer Institute
Harold P. Freeman, MD, is the Associate Director of the National Cancer Institute and Director of the NCI Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities. Dr. Freeman is also the Medical Director of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention in New York. He holds the academic rank of Professor of Clinical Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. For 25 years (1974-1999), Dr. Freeman was the Director of Surgery at Harlem Hospital in New York City and, for a two-year period ending 2001, Dr. Freeman served as President and CEO of North General Hospital in New York City. Dr. Freeman was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine in 1997. Dr. Freeman has been actively involved with the American Cancer Society for many years and served as its national president from 1988-89. Dr. Freeman has pioneered the "Patient Navigation Program," which addresses disparities in access to treatment particularly among poor and uninsured people. This program is designed to assist medically underserved patients in navigating their way through a complex health system by overcoming traditional access barriers to timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The success of Dr. Freeman's "Patient Navigation Program" has received national attention from Congress and has led other health care organizations to adopt similar programs.

Jessie Gruman, PhD
President and Executive Director
Center for the Advancement of Health
Jessie Gruman, PhD, is the president and founding executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Health, a Washington-based policy institute funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other foundations to translate health research into effective policy and practice. The Center works specifically to ensure that evidence on social, behavioral and economic factors is applied to the prevention, management and treatment of disease. Dr. Gruman has worked on this same set of concerns in the private sector (AT&T), the public sector (National Institutes of Health) and the voluntary health sector (American Cancer Society). At the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute, Dr. Gruman designed and implemented a nine-year, $150 million program to reduce national smoking prevalence through public policy change, media advocacy and citizen activism. She received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College and her PhD from Columbia University. She serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Annals of Family Medicine. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the American Psychosocial Oncology Society, on the National Advisory Council for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and on the Board of Directors of the National Health Council.

Ichiro Kawachi, MD, PhD
Professor of Social Epidemiology;
Director, Harvard Center for Society and Health
Harvard University
Ichiro Kawachi, MD, PhD, is Professor of Social Epidemiology and Director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health, both at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Kawachi received his MD and PhD from the University of Otago, New Zealand. Dr. Kawachi's research seeks to link macro social forces – such as income distribution, social cohesion and social capital, inequalities in political participation, and residential segregation – to patterns of health and disease in populations. Studies in progress feature both ecologic and multi–level designs, with a variety of health outcomes (mortality, morbidity, quality of life). He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles and reviews in scientific journals. He was the co-editor (with Lisa Berkman) of Social Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. His most recent books include The Health of Nations with Bruce Kennedy (The New Press, 2002) and Neighborhoods and Health with Lisa Berkman (Oxford University Press, 2003). Dr. Kawachi is the Senior Editor (Social Epidemiology) of the international journal Social Science & Medicine, as well as an Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology. He has consulted in the past with WHO and the Pan-American Health Organization and has taught courses on social epidemiology in New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Mexico and Chile.

Barbara Kivimae Krimgold
Senior Project Director
Center for the Advancement of Health  
Barbara Kivimae Krimgold is director of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Scholars in Health Disparities program and director of the upcoming Web site project, "Celebrating Diversity Interactive Database: Quality of Life Indicators for Urban Americans of Color" at the Center for the Advancement of Health. She is also a senior advisor to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Men's Health project, "Saving Men's Lives." With a broad background in health policy spanning three decades, she translates research about population health into health policy frameworks and information for media and policy communities. For more than 10 years she served as a health policy professional within the U.S. Office of Management and Budget – serving under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan – and as the top health policy professional for the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. She has worked with many non-profit organizations and several foundations on U.S. and global health programs. She is the co-editor of Income, Socioeconomic Status and Health: Exploring the Relationships and The American Woman 1996-97: Women and Work and the co-author of Improving Health: It Doesn't Take a Revolution and Incorporating Socioeconomic Factors into U.S. Health Policy: Addressing the Barriers. She graduated from Harvard College and won a National Defense Education Act Fellowship to study at Harvard's Graduate Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Sir Michael Marmot, MD, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health;
Director, International Centre for Health and Society
University College London
Sir Michael Marmot, MD, PhD, is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College London. He is also Adjunct Professor of Health and Social Behaviour at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has a medical degree from the University of Sydney and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He was elected as a founding fellow of the Academy of Medical Science (FMedSci.). In 2002 he was elected to Foreign Associate Membership of the Institute of Medicine. He has served on numerous national and international committees. He has coordinated two European Research networks, and is now co-cordinator of the European Science Foundation network on inequalities in healthy life expectancy. He has been a member of two research networks of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, and a member of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research Population Research program. He chaired the Ontario Institute for Work and Health Research Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. He was a member of the National Research Council (National Academies) panel on New Populations for an Aging World. He has given a number of named lectures and keynote lectures over the last several years. He has published more than 400 scientific papers, has authored one monograph and co-edited six books (one in press). In the New Year's Honours List 2000, he was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen "For Services to Epidemiology and Understanding Health Inequalities.”

Karen A. Matthews, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry, Epidemiology, and Psychology
University of Pittsburgh
Karen A. Matthews, PhD, is Professor of Psychiatry, Epidemiology, and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where since 1983 she also has been Program Director of the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Research Training Program. She is also Director of the Pittsburgh Mind Body Center, one of five centers in the country established in 2000 by the National Institutes of Health to study mind/body relationships and health. Her research has focused on behavioral risk factors and their determinants at key developmental transitions, e.g. adolescence and menopause. In 1990, she received a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health for her work pertaining to the relationship between behavioral stress and reproductive hormones and their impact on risk for cardiovascular disease. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the Socioeconomic Status and Health Research Program of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Board of External Advisors. She has previously served as a member of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Advisory Council, Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Women's Health Initiative, Chair of the Center for Scientific Review Advisory Committee, Editor-in-Chief of Health Psychology, President of the American Psychosomatic Society, and President of Health Psychology (Division 38) of the American Psychological Association.

Bruce S. McEwen, PhD
Professor and Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch
Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology
Rockefeller University
Bruce S. McEwen, PhD, is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. Dr. McEwen graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Oberlin College in 1959 and obtained his PhD in cell biology in 1964 from The Rockefeller University. He returned to Rockefeller in 1966 to work with the psychologist Prof. Neal Miller after postdoctoral studies in neurobiology in Sweden and a brief period on the faculty at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed as Professor at Rockefeller in 1981. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He served as Dean of Graduate Studies from 1991-93 and as President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1997-98. Dr. McEwen’s laboratory research deals with the impact of stress and stress hormones on the brain and on immune function. He and his laboratory colleagues also study sex differences and sex hormone, especially estrogen, effects on the brain, particularly those effects that are “non-reproductive.” His laboratory combines molecular, anatomical, pharmacological, physiological and behavioral methodologies and relates their findings to human clinical information. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, in which he is helping to reformulate concepts and measurements related to stress and stress hormones in the context of human societies. He is the co-author of a new book with science writer Elizabeth Lasley for a lay audience called The End of Stress as We Know It, published by the Joseph Henry Press and the Dana Press.

Amani M. Nuru-Jeter, PhD, MPH
Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar
University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley
Amani M. Nuru-Jeter, PhD, MPH, is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley. Dr. Nuru-Jeter received her PhD in Health Policy and Management, Health and Social Policy, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Broadly, Dr. Nuru-Jeter's work focuses on structural inequalities, psycho-social and environmental context and its implications for racial inequalities in health. Dr. Nuru-Jeter is currently a co-investigator on a project with the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco, working on the systematic development of a tool to measure racism and racial discrimination and its influence on reproductive health outcomes. She is also working on the conceptualization of race as a marker for exposure to chronic stress and is examining the influence of psychosocial and contextual factors on racial differences in allostatic load. Dr. Nuru-Jeter currently serves on the Executive Board of the Society for the Analysis of African-American Public Health Issues and is a Core Member of the Health Disparities Working Group of the National Children's Study. She is also a Core Member of the Measures of Racism Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she has been involved in national efforts to develop measures of racism and racial discrimination.

Robert K. Ross, MD
President and CEO
The California Endowment
Robert K. Ross, MD, is president and chief executive officer for The California Endowment, a health foundation established in 1996 to address the health needs of Californians. Prior to his appointment in September 2000, Dr. Ross served as director of the Health and Human Services Agency for the County of San Diego from 1993 to 2000. Dr. Ross has an extensive background as a clinician and public health administrator. His service includes: Commissioner, Philadelphia Department of Public Health; medical director for LINK School-Based Clinic Program, Camden, New Jersey; instructor of clinical medicine, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; and faculty member at San Diego State University's School of Public Health. Dr. Ross has been actively involved in community and professional activities at both the local and national level. He served as a member of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, and on the boards of the National Marrow Donor Program, San Diego United Way and Jackie Robinson YMCA. He is a Diplomate of the American Academy of Pediatrics, served on the President's Summit for America's Future and as chairman of the national Boost for Kids Initiative. Dr. Ross received his undergraduate, master’s in Public Administration and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Teresa Seeman, PhD
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
University of California, Los Angeles
Teresa Seeman, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in the UCLA Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Previously, she was on the faculty in the Department of Epidemiology in the Yale School of Public Health from 1985 to 1995 and then spent two years on the faculty at the Andrus School of Gerontology at USC. She joined the faculty at UCLA in January 1998 with joint appointments in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Her research interests focus on the role of socio-cultural factors in health and aging with specific interest in understanding the biological pathways through which these factors influence health and aging. A major focus of her research relates to understanding how aspects of the social environment, particularly social ties, influence health and aging. Dr. Seeman was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Successful Aging (1985-1995) and is currently a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. She is also currently a consultant to the Behavioral and Social Research Program at the National Institute on Aging on issues relating to the integration of physiological parameters into more socio-behavioral models of health and aging. In collaboration with Dr. Bruce McEwen and Dr. Burton Singer, she has taken a lead in empirical research on the new concept of allostatic load.

S. Leonard Syme, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology
University of California, Berkeley
S. Leonard Syme, PhD, has been a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1968. His major research interest has been psychosocial risk factors such as job stress, social support and poverty. In doing this research, he has studied San Francisco bus drivers; Japanese living in Japan, Hawaii and California; British civil servants; and people living in Alameda County, California. Dr. Syme has written two books and more than 135 published papers, and has been a visiting professor at universities in England and Japan. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine and has received several honors related to his teaching and research, among them the Lilienfeld Award for Excellence in Teaching, the J.D. Bruce Award for Distinguished Contributions in Preventive Medicine from the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the University of California Distinguished Emeritus Professor Award. Now retired, Dr. Syme is Principal Investigator of The Wellness Guide Project in California which is attempting to empower people and communities using printed materials, television, and community resource development.

Stephen B. Thomas, PhD
Professor of Community Health and Social Justice;
Director, Center for Minority Health
University of Pittsburgh
Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, is Director of the Center for Minority Health and the Philip Hallen Professor of Community Health and Social Justice in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, he holds a joint appointment as Professor in the School of Social Work. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Thomas earned his doctorate in Community Health Education from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. During the past 15 years, Dr. Thomas has applied his expertise in behavioral science and health education in the African-American community. His work has addressed several critical public health issues, including but not limited to HIV/AIDS, youth violence, substance abuse and the need for more organ and tissue donations among African Americans. Dr. Thomas came to Pittsburgh in 2000 after eight years at Emory University in Atlanta where he was associate professor in the department of behavioral sciences and health education, and director, Institute for Minority Health Research at Rollins School of Public Health. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Maryland, where he was co-founder and director of the Minority Health Research Laboratory; Southern Illinois University and the University of North Carolina. In 1995, he was a consultant to the National Research Council, Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Preventing HIV Transmission: The Role of Sterile Needles and Bleach.

David R. Williams, PhD
Harold W. Cruse Collegiate Professor of Sociology;
Professor of Epidemiology;
Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
David R. Williams, PhD, is the Harold W. Cruse Collegiate Professor of Sociology, Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research, Professor of Epidemiology, and Faculty Associate in the Program for Research on Black Americans and the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University, and Associate Professor of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. His research has focused on social influences on health and he is centrally interested in the trends and determinants of socioeconomic and racial differences in mental and physical health. In 2001, he was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine. He has served on the Department of Health and Human Services' National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (and chair of its subcommittee on Minority and Other Special Populations), and the National Science Foundation's Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey. He has also held elected and appointed positions in professional organizations, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Public Health Association. Currently, he is on the board of directors of Academy Health and a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and also serves on its Panel on Race, Ethnicity and Health in Later Life.