The police killings of unarmed Black Americans against the backdrop of a global pandemic disproportionately impacting Black communities has laid bare the deadly consequences of racism in the United States and around the World. Grounded in Critical Race Theory and Ecosocial Theory, this presentation will discuss structural racism from a global perspective and examine empirical evidence linking it to racial inequities in health in the United States and Brazil.

Biography

Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the intersection of “place, race, and health.” Dr. Barber leverages state-of-the-art epidemiologic cohort studies to examine how neighborhood-level structural determinants of health such as concentrated economic disinvestment and racial residential segregation impact cardiometabolic risk factors and cardiovascular disease onset among Blacks in the Southern United States and Brazil. Her work is framed through a structural racism lens, grounded in interdisciplinary theories (e.g. Ecosocial Theory and Critical Race Theory) and employs various advanced methodological techniques including multilevel modeling and longitudinal data analyses. Through empirical evidence, her work seeks to document how racism becomes “embodied” through the neighborhood context and how this fundamental structural determinant of racial health inequities can be leveraged for transformative change through anti-racist policy initiatives.

Over the past 5 years, Dr. Barber has served as Principle Investigator on several externally-funded research projects and has secured over $2.5 million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Heart Association. Her empirical work and academic commentary has been published in leading academic journals including Lancet Infectious Disease, the American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science and Medicine. Currently, Dr. Barber serves on the Jackson Heart Study Scientific Council and co-chair of the Social Determinants of Health Working Group.

Dr. Barber received a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health. Dr. Barber is committed to using her scholarship to make the invisible, visible; mobilize data for action; and contribute to the transnational dialogue around racism and health inequities.

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