We would like to welcome our newest faculty member at the Duke Global Health Institute, Dr. Kim Blankenship.
Dr. Blankenship will have a joint appointment as an Associate Research Professor with the Duke Global Health Institute and the Department of Sociology. She will lead the Institute’s signature research initiative in Gender, Poverty and Health and will teach a course on this topic in Sociology in the fall.
Her research interests focus on race, class, and gender analyses of health, and health-related laws and policies. In her work, she seeks to understand social contextual factors associated with health inequities and to identify structural interventions to address these inequities. In particular, she has focused her attention on the social context of risk-taking among women, African Americans, and drug users and analyzes the role of policy and law in shaping HIV risk and transmission.
Dr. Blankenship is currently the principal investigator on a research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to analyze the implementation and impact of community mobilization interventions to address HIV risk in female sex workers in India. She was also the PI on a NIDA funded grant to analyze the impact of the criminal justice system in shaping HIV risk among drug users, and race and gender differences in these impacts. She has taught at Yale since 1986 in the Department of Sociology and served as an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Yale School of Public Health. She also served as the Associate Director of Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS.
In addition to her research and teaching activities, Dr. Blankenship has served as the Chair of the Health, Health Policy, and Health Services Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, on the Editorial Board of Gender & Society, and as a member of the CDC’s Concept Mapping Working Group studying structural interventions in HIV.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Blankenship to the Duke Global Health Institute.
