← Projects

Community-Engaged Research to Advance Health Equity

Emerging research area

---

Generating rigorous evidence on the social and structural determinants of health disparities is necessary but not sufficient — that evidence must also be produced in meaningful partnership with the communities most affected by those disparities, and designed from the outset to inform action. An emerging line of my research program focuses on community-engaged approaches that center the expertise and priorities of underserved communities in the design, conduct, and translation of health equity research and the implementation of interventions aimed at reducing health disparities.

This work draws on intersectional frameworks to attend to how multiple, overlapping dimensions of structural disadvantage — including race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic position — jointly shape health risk and access to care in ways that single-axis analyses often obscure. By integrating intersectionality with community-engaged methods, this research aims to produce evidence that is both analytically precise and practically meaningful for the populations and organizations it seeks to serve.

Looking ahead, I am developing research in this area that examines multilevel structural stressors and their consequences for health inequities in underserved populations, with an emphasis on building community capacity, informing clinical practice, and identifying modifiable targets for structural and policy-level intervention. This work is grounded in principles of community governance, shared decision-making, and the co-production of knowledge; and is oriented toward implementation science frameworks that bridge the gap between research evidence and real-world health equity action.