On Monday, February 8th, in partnership with the UW-Madison Prevention Research Center, the Department of Population Health Sciences hosted Dr. Whitney Robinson, as PHS Monday Seminar speaker. Dr. Robinson’s talk, on her research into racial health disparities in Covid-19, garnered cross-campus interest, as seen with this article in the UW-Madison undergraduate-led newspaper, The Badger Herald.
In this talk, Dr. Robinson reflected on how the past year accelerated several trends in her work that centers on social determinants of ethnoracial disparities in health among Black American populations. Starting in the late 2010s, Dr. Robinson began a program of research in gynecologic epidemiology grounded in Reproductive Justice, Intersectionality, and the Public Health Critical Race Praxis.
Dr. Robinson described how the public health crisis of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak coupled with the increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement reshaped her motivations as a scholar, her modes of dissemination, and the substance of her work.
Dr. Robinson is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. See her bio here
Papers related to this talk:
- *McClure ES, Vasudevan P, Bailey Z, Patel S, Robinson WR. 2020. Racial Capitalism Within Public Health—How Occupational Settings Drive COVID-19 Disparities. American Journal of Epidemiology 189(11): 1244–1253. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwaa126. PMC7337680
- Robinson WR, Bailey ZD. Invited Commentary: What Social Epidemiology Brings to the Table-Reconciling Social Epidemiology and Causal Inference. Am J Epidemiol. 2020 Mar 2;189(3):171-174. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwz197.
- The essay summarized and linked here
- An online Comment (letter to the editor) on a commentary on Dong et al’s key article on COVID-19 among pediatric populations: Link to the Commentary and my comment and Link to the original article