Mentor: Tariem Burroughs

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on addressing issues of systemic racism and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in workplaces. Internships play a pivotal role in shaping career trajectories and providing opportunities for professional growth. This research project aims to investigate past internship positions to understand the extent to which organizations have been actively involved in antiracism efforts through their internship programs. A historical analysis can also provide valuable insights into the evolution of public health education and practice over time. Students will do the following:

• Clearly define and determine the specific time frame you want to study and the objectives you aim to achieve.
• Gather historical data related to public health internships.
• Develop a timeline that outlines key events, policy changes, and developments in public health education and practice during the chosen time frame to contextualize the internship experiences.
• Examine external factors that may have influenced changes in internship experiences. This could include changes in public health policies, advancements in technology, shifts in public health priorities, or shifts in educational approaches.
• Discuss the implications of their findings. (i.e. How have changes in internship experiences impacted the education and preparedness of public health students? Have these changes positively or negatively affected the field of public health?)
• Summarize their findings and draw conclusions about the historical evolution of public health internships.
• Present Findings

Mentor: Cindy Ngo

The IDEA Fellow, in close collaboration with the Office of Education, will play a pivotal role in spearheading a student group dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within our school community. As our institution seeks to bridge the gap between students and the school, we recognize the critical importance of understanding what makes students feel truly included and seen. Our primary objective for the fellow is to guide these student-led initiatives, harnessing their creativity and energy to explore innovative ways for all students to feel valued, heard, and fully integrated into the fabric of our school. To facilitate this important work, we are committed to providing the necessary structure and funding to support these vital endeavors. Together, we aim to create an inclusive and nurturing environment where every student’s voice is not only heard but celebrated.

Mentor: Bertranna Muruthi

The Department of Community Health and Prevention is seeking an IDEA fellow to work with a faculty mentor on a project that supports the goals of the department’s Diversity and Racial Justice Committee (DRJC) during academic year 2023-2024. The committee was formalized in 2021 as a result of a working group that convened for over a year to discuss how CHP can be more intentionally anti-racist, support BIPOC students, and teach anti-racist pedagogy. They produced a report focused on improving departmental culture, recruitment and retention, and curricular and programmatic matters. This report has been the guidepost for the committee, which meets monthly. The DRJC includes a mix of CHP faculty, staff, and students. The DRJC IDEA fellow responsibilities will include co-leading these monthly meetings in order to help establish priorities for the academic year. New project ideas from the IDEA fellow for the committee are welcome and encouraged. In collaboration with committee members, some examples of IDEA fellow activities include developing an evaluation plan to assess the effectiveness of department, school, and university wide efforts to increase diversity among students, staff, and faculty. There have been numerous activities which have increased in number almost exponentially over the last five years to increase diversity throughout the university. These activities have occurred often in isolation within departments, schools, and university wide. Little effort has gone into evaluating these efforts and disentangling, to the extent possible, the impact of each. Starting with the efforts being conducted in the CHP department and expanding outward to efforts being conducted at the school of public health and the university, this project will explore ways in which evaluation efforts can take place at each of these levels and be integrated. The outcome will be an evaluation plan or set of plans that can be implemented as efforts continue to increase diversity. Our department has expertise at the faculty level and through our course offerings in the evaluation of activities designed to increase diversity and is ideally suited to taking on such a project.

Mentor: Renee’ Moore & Rory Schonning

The IDEA DITAE Fellow will be an integral part of pushing forward our next year of work in pursuing the vision: The collective health equity research at Dornsife School of Public Health is valued, supported, and leads to a positive impact on public health, while creating a safe and rich environment for health equity researchers to thrive. This vision was created by the Guiding Team of the Drexel Initiative for Transforming Academia for Equity (DITAE) project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The Fellow will partner with the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at DSPH and the Biostatistics Scientific Collaboration Center (BSC) to help close the gap in making this DITAE vision a reality.

In what ways do institutional processes facilitate equitable, impactful and sustainable health equity research? Where do they actually uphold systemic racism and other systems of oppression, creating barriers to community based health equity research? The Fellow will hone these questions, compile literature reviews and institutional examples to build a foundation of understanding, engage with staff and faculty members to gather experiences and perspectives, be guided in conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses, and present findings. The Fellow can expect to be invited to bring their perspectives to collaborative meetings within the school and with thought partners across universities. This fellowship is for a student who is interested in health equity research, has a desire to learn more about how health equity research is conducted, wants to grow their quantitative and qualitative analysis skills, and is inspired to be part of pushing forward structural systems change for more equitable research. The particular focus areas of the Office of DEIB, along with the strengths and interests of the Fellow, will be discussed to further develop the project together.

Mentor: Kasim Ortiz

The NIH defines “inclusive excellence” as the cultivation of scientific environments that can engage and benefit from a full range of talent. Empirical evidence highlights how diversity significantly enhances innovation and broadens capacity for developing effective public health programs to optimize population health. Nonetheless, currently an empirical operationalization of “inclusive excellence” is non-existent; constraining our ability to sustainably monitor efforts that may positively shape cultivating “inclusive excellence”. This project will produce preliminary survey data collected (anonymously/de-identified) among DSPH students, faculty and staff, to test the psychometric properties of a new scale capturing perceptions of “inclusiveness”. An IDEA Fellow should anticipate gaining the following skills: 1) fielding an online Qualtrics survey; 2) monitor completion rates and make unique outreach to increase participation where/when necessary; 3) data processing/management; 4) complete preliminary descriptive analyses; and 5) contribute to project dissemination efforts, which might include a study report and/or peer-reviewed manuscript. Over the course of Winter & Spring 2024, the IDEA Fellow will gain invaluable skills regarding survey Expected Fellows should exhibit strong communication skills and possess strong organizational skills, show an interest in enhancing applied quantitative research experience, and importantly exhibit a foundational commitment to diversity. Establishing the psychometric properties of a new measure capturing “inclusiveness” can assist Dornsife SPH in sustainably evaluating and identifying ways to consistently bolster diversity. The project will likely result in both a DSPH specific report and manuscript for peer-review.

Mentor: Jennifer Ware

ABOUT

The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements & Population Health Equity, Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University unites diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally. The Ubuntu Center addresses ways in which structural racism and inequities impact health. The meaning of the center, Ubuntu “I am…because we are” truly embraces the essence of what we stand for. Working collectively, we will achieve a just future, free from systems of oppression, full of new possibilities through bold, collective action, and an equitable world in which all individuals and communities are healthy and thrive.

THE NEED

The Ubuntu Center is rooted in the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; the state-sanctioned violence by law enforcement in 2020, most notably the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd; the resulting protests that were sparked globally; and the renewed sense of urgency around racism as a public health crisis.

OUR APPROACH

Partnering with faculty, staff, movement fellows, global constituents, and community members, we will work together to connect antiracism and population health scholarship and action locally and nationally to ongoing work happening in other parts of the world. We will provide dedicated spaces for rigorous, transdisciplinary research and bold collective action designed to address racism and eliminate racial health inequities. Here’s how:

-Advance transdisciplinary, anti-racist population health research training and scholarship.

-Bridge relationships to build critical consciousness and power for health equity and racial justice.

-Expand collective action for population health aligned with the principles and practices of community organizing and social movements.

-Strengthen capacity and sustainability to maximize our impact.

IDEA FELLOWSHIP PROJECT DESCRIPTION

There are many ways to help move the mission and vision of The Ubuntu Center forward. We invite IDEA Fellows to work alongside the center staff and faculty to address how structural racism, power, and community solutions manifest on topics such as climate change/adaptation, land and dispossession, housing and affordability, and more.

The Illuminating and Addressing Structural Racism in the Healthcare Industry: Building the Field From the Ground, Up is a three year project where our transdisciplinary team of researchers, thought leaders, and community organizers will engage in a community-centered and movement-informed process that addresses these gaps by engaging a diverse group of partners inclusive of community members, organizers and activists, scholars, medical/healthcare practitioners, and other key stakeholders nationally and across three to five regional sites to illuminate how structural racism “shows up” in the healthcare industry. The ultimate goal of this project is to lay a foundation for identifying the policies, practices, and norms that uphold structural racism in the healthcare industry and identify entry-points for radical healing and transformation. To accomplish this our team will: 1) Cultivate a diverse network inclusive of scholars, community members, organizers and activists, and healthcare practitioners engaged in antiracism efforts; 2) Develop a framework to understand structural racism in the healthcare industry and identify potential levers for healing and transformation utilizing systems science and organizing tools; 3) Translate and disseminate project learnings to key audiences through a collaborative, multimedia narrative strategy; and Co-develop organizing tools that build power and agency towards accountability and policy transformation.

We are seeking a public health student to bring their insight to support our efforts in the form of brainstorming innovative ways to have conversations with our partners and community residents from areas across the US, drafting interview protocols, and supporting our research team with securing and preparing required documentation required for the IRB board at Drexel.

This would be a great opportunity for someone who would like first hand experience learning the process of developing a research protocol from start to finish.

Mentor: Jennifer Ware

ABOUT

The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements & Population Health Equity, Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University unites diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally. The Ubuntu Center addresses ways in which structural racism and inequities impact health. The meaning of the center, Ubuntu “I am…because we are” truly embraces the essence of what we stand for. Working collectively, we will achieve a just future, free from systems of oppression, full of new possibilities through bold, collective action, and an equitable world in which all individuals and communities are healthy and thrive.

THE NEED

The Ubuntu Center is rooted in the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; the state-sanctioned violence by law enforcement in 2020, most notably the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd; the resulting protests that were sparked globally; and the renewed sense of urgency around racism as a public health crisis.

OUR APPROACH

Partnering with faculty, staff, movement fellows, global constituents, and community members, we will work together to connect antiracism and population health scholarship and action locally and nationally to ongoing work happening in other parts of the world. We will provide dedicated spaces for rigorous, transdisciplinary research and bold collective action designed to address racism and eliminate racial health inequities. Here’s how:

-Advance transdisciplinary, anti-racist population health research training and scholarship.

-Bridge relationships to build critical consciousness and power for health equity and racial justice.

-Expand collective action for population health aligned with the principles and practices of community organizing and social movements.

-Strengthen capacity and sustainability to maximize our impact.

IDEA FELLOWSHIP PROJECT DESCRIPTION

There are many ways to help move the mission and vision of The Ubuntu Center forward. We invite IDEA Fellows to work alongside the center staff and faculty to address how structural racism, power, and community solutions manifest on topics such as climate change/adaptation, land and dispossession, housing and affordability, and more.

The Ubuntu Center’s annual Global Series provides a space for sharing and co-learning opportunities for and from our community. We aim to contribute to building bridges across the local community and the Diaspora and plant seeds grounded in social justice and equity to thrive and nurture dreams and possibilities of change in a world without walls and centered on the Ubuntu principle of humanity “I am because you are.”

Each year, The Ubuntu Global Series holds two sessions were we are in conversation with a local scholar activist (within the United States) and a global scholar activist. Previous conversations have focused on learning and discussing climate change, including its impact on our communities, sharing possibilities and solutions to address this global challenge, and Reproductive Justice through the lens of local and global activists, academics, and practitioners, sharing experiences, perspectives, and thoughts to ensure human rights.

We are seeking a public health student to bring their insight to support our efforts in the form of brainstorming conversation topics, innovative ways to have conversations with our partners, support our Postdoctoral Fellow with recruitment and coordination of global series speakers, and help to develop the agenda and conversation run of show.

This would be a great opportunity for someone who would like first-hand experience in speaker recruitment and translation of a vision into a reality related to building bridges across the African Diaspora.

Mentor: Jennifer Ware

ABOUT

The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements & Population Health Equity, Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University unites diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally. The Ubuntu Center addresses ways in which structural racism and inequities impact health. The meaning of the center, Ubuntu “I am…because we are” truly embraces the essence of what we stand for. Working collectively, we will achieve a just future, free from systems of oppression, full of new possibilities through bold, collective action, and an equitable world in which all individuals and communities are healthy and thrive.

THE NEED

The Ubuntu Center is rooted in the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; the state-sanctioned violence by law enforcement in 2020, most notably the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd; the resulting protests that were sparked globally; and the renewed sense of urgency around racism as a public health crisis.

OUR APPROACH

Partnering with faculty, staff, movement fellows, global constituents, and community members, we will work together to connect antiracism and population health scholarship and action locally and nationally to ongoing work happening in other parts of the world. We will provide dedicated spaces for rigorous, transdisciplinary research and bold collective action designed to address racism and eliminate racial health inequities. Here’s how:

-Advance transdisciplinary, anti-racist population health research training and scholarship.

-Bridge relationships to build critical consciousness and power for health equity and racial justice.

-Expand collective action for population health aligned with the principles and practices of community organizing and social movements.

-Strengthen capacity and sustainability to maximize our impact.

IDEA FELLOWSHIP PROJECT DESCRIPTION

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” – bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

The Ubuntu Center’s annual Teach-in Series provide the opportunity to foster relationships between organizers, community groups, and researchers to discuss and explore how to fulfill a shared mission. The overall goal of the Ubuntu Center teach-ins are to create a co-learning space for scholars, organizers, activists, and community residents to build critical consciousness about entrenched inequities created by racism and other systems of oppression and find ways to collaborate on community-led and community-centered research and solutions. It is an opportunity for organizers, students, and scholars to share their expertise with one another. The sessions help to

• Socialize ‘Ubuntu’ and the importance of collective action

• Build relationships, trust, and a sense of community both within the Ubuntu Center and with our external partners

The teach-ins use the Ubuntu Center’s Pain, Power, and Possibilities frame to acknowledge structural harms, become familiar with different approaches to addressing those harms and have opportunities to engage in collective reparative work. Our goal is that by the end of each teach-in, participants should

1. Understand the relationship between health inequities, systemic injustice, and their relationships to housing, land justice, and the carceral system in Philadelphia and beyond;

2. Understand, from both current and historical perspectives, the role of community organizing in challenging structural discrimination;

3. Develop relationships across disciplines (e.g., academia, activists, policymakers, students, etc.) that can catalyze further action on advancing justice; and

4. begin to develop shared language, shared values, and agendas between academia and community organizing

We are seeking a public health student to bring their insight to support our efforts in the form of brainstorming potential themes of the teach-ins this year, leading the coordination of the teach-in series, which may involve facilitating the planning team meetings and communicating with the center’s Deputy Director on operational support needed for the series to be successful.

This would be a great opportunity for someone who would like first-hand experience in speaker recruitment, project management, and creating informal space for the variety of experts to come together and learn alongside one another.

Mentor: Ayden Scheim & Kelly Courts

Valid and reliable measures of perceived discrimination are important for monitoring the burden of discrimination and studying its impacts on population health. Historically, discrimination measures have tended to focus on one type of discrimination at a time (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia). Guided by intersectionality, a framework that calls attention to how multiple systems of privilege and oppression shape our health and social experiences, members of our team developed the Intersectional Discrimination Index (InDI). The InDI is a set of three measures of anticipated, day-to-day, and major discrimination that allows respondents to report discrimination based on any social identity or position.

As part of a study funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R21MD016177), we are currently conducting an evaluation of the InDI using cognitive interviews and psychometric methods, in English and Spanish with diverse U.S. adults. With a supplement from NIMHD, we are also developing and evaluating a modified version of the InDI intended for research with people living with HIV (R21MD016177-01S1).

The study is on the cusp of recruiting for an online survey containing the revised InDI developed through cognitive interviews over the past year. A multi-phased recruitment approach is being utilized to enroll key demographic groups, including Black and Latinx people, people living with HIV, and sexual and gender minorities, that will allow for robust psychometric evaluation.

Opportunities for IDEA Fellow involvement include assisting with recruitment, monitoring incoming data, survey data analysis, communicating with the multi-national study team, conducting literature reviews, and the potential to serve as a co-author on publications generated from the work (or to pursue their own research interests with the data). This position is ideal for students with interest in and/or experience with online survey research, quantitative data analysis, and anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and intersectional approaches.

Mentor:Elizabeth Valdez & Ali Groves

Project Description: The Philly Joy Bank is a guaranteed income pilot program, led by the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH),designed to address financial instability for birthing parents to improve parental and infant health outcomes. The evaluation of the Philly Joy Bank, led by members of Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health, is grounded in a reproductive justice (RJ) approach that values the understandings and experiences with sexuality and reproduction for diverse marginalized people. The evaluation objective is to understand whether and how receipt of guaranteed income during and after pregnancy impacts parental mental health and prematurity (as well as other intermediate outcomes) using a mixed-methods design. Specifically, the evaluation team proposes to use quantitative and participatory research methods during pregnancy and through 12 months postpartum to examine the feasibility and acceptability of the Philly Joy Bank; and to understand whether and how receipt of the Joy Bank improves parental and infant health and well-being. The evaluation is led by a multidisciplinary team at Drexel University with complementary expertise and significant history in participatory research methods, collaborative program design, implementation, and evaluation with community partners. The evaluation team would benefit from the addition of an MPH student who is committed to using research methods to support the evaluation of an intervention designed to promote racial equity./p>

Advancing Racial Justice and Anti-Racism: Structural racism and discrimination negatively affect the economic security and mobility of Black people, with negative consequences for health. The cash transfers provided through the Philly Joy Bank are designed to increase economic security during a major life transition and to combat the effects of structural racism by increasing economic security; thus, promoting racial equity./p>

IDEA Fellow’s Responsibilities: The IDEA Fellow will have the opportunity to engage in all aspects of the evaluation process. The Fellow will gain mixed methods research skills and will assist with protocol development, quantitative instrument development and entry into Qualtrics, and participatory qualitative methods data collection and analysis. The IDEA Fellow will also be invited to attend regular meetings between key stakeholders (e.g., PDPH, the Joy Bank steering community, neighborhood community researchers with lived experience, etc). Through this opportunity, the Fellow will gain novel experience with guaranteed income programs as a key strategy to address Maternal and Child Health inequities in the US.

Scholars argue that faculty of color and those from underrepresented backgrounds may be judged by a higher standard than their white peers in the tenure and promotion process. This may be due to the “invisible labor” done by these faculty in service-related activities, mentoring, and community outreach that is not typically rewarded in the tenure and promotion process. Given the importance of a diverse academic workforce (at all ranks), as well as training and rewarding allies for work done to advance diversity and inclusion, we need research to determine the extent to which universities and their faculty desire including diversity and inclusion as a part of the annual review and/or tenure and promotion process. This initiative may include gathering and reviewing T&P criteria from Drexel and other universities to access the extent of inclusion of diversity and inclusion elements in their review process, including whether this reporting is voluntary or mandatory. In addition, surveying the faculty about whether they approve of including these elements in the review process is important because achieving buy-in from stakeholders is key in such a democratic process. This project may lead to changes in how diversity and inclusion activities are incentivized among DSPH faculty, as well as lead to a publication or report describing how universities are handling these important issues more broadly. This information will also be used to inform NIH FIRST program grantees about strategies used at other universities to improve how diversity and inclusion activities are handled in tenure and promotion committees nationwide. Finally, IDEA Fellow candidates interested in this project will gain a greater understanding of academic governance and related tenure and promotion policies.

Point of Contact: Jan Eberth, Chair HMP

The IDEA Fellow will work closely with the Associate Dean for Research to advance and help sustain the Research theme of the Antiracism Action Plan (AAP). Specifically, the fellow will help further develop and help sustain existing strategies for supporting research and research training focused on antiracism and elimination of health inequities experienced by BIPOC.  Existing activities for faculty include supporting the development of grants focused on antiracism by collecting and disseminating antiracism focused grant funding announcements and providing resources for faculty to apply for diversity supplements, and collection and analysis of data collected as part of faculty annual reviews to determine the extent/growth of research focused on the impact of racism on health and inequities.  Existing activities focused on students include a seminar series for graduate students on antiracist research, and provision of resources for BIPOC students to write student grants (F32). New activities could include, (a) collaboration with Ubuntu Center and FIRST faculty to help develop training materials or other resources to help faculty and/or students write content for grants focused on racism/health antiracism (e.g., collection and dissemination of key research articles); (b) improve or further develop the data collection system to assess antiracism research activities, including development of metrics that can be tracked longitudinally to assess growth in this area; (c) develop a boot camp for PhD students to write student grant submissions; (d) support the development of research training grants focused on antiracism (e.g., R25). The specific activities conducted by the IDEA fellow will thus include continued support of existing activities, in addition to one or more new activity.

Point of Contact: Brisa Sanchez, Associate Dean for Research

Work with Drs. Bellamy and Moore on Dornsife Initiative to Transform Academia for Equity (DITAE) project. This project was recently funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) whose overarching goal is to create and sustain the structures, policies and culture changes needed to ensure both the academic success of diverse scholars and the production of scientific knowledge relevant to eliminating health inequities in our society at the Dornsife School of Public Health (DSPH). DITAE builds on a long DSPH tradition of a commitment to equity, diversity and social justice as critical to improving population health reflected in the foundational principles of the School twenty-five years ago and manifested today in the School’s diverse faculty and in its rich work on policy and community-engaged health equity research. The program will also leverage the School’s strategic plan which espouses inclusion and diversity as fundamental values critical to its public health mission as well as the Dornsife Antiracism Action Plan (AAP) launched in the summer of 2020 and the work of the Antiracism Implementation Task force described below. Responsibilities will include assisting with revising the 2020 DSPH Climate Survey; summarizing and contrasting key findings from 2020 and 2022 Climate Surveys; and assisting in preparation for facilitating focus group activities for DITAE.

Points of Contact: Scarlett Bellamy, Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion and Renee Moore, Director of the Biostatistics Scientific Collaboration Center

The following describes the objectives of the learning objectives of Dr. Shim’s self-directed learning course. You will assist in translating this content to a community experience that we can engage in as a school community.

The Aspen Institute defines structural racism as “a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time.” However, these systems are populated by people, and thus, individuals need to commit to a practice of education and self-reflection to become anti-racist and to begin to dismantle structural racism in the systems in which we all interact.

This self-directed learning course is designed to be engaging and entertaining to develop a life-long practice of self-reflection. For 20 days, as a community, we will commit to read, watch, and listen to the provided educational content and answer self-reflection questions to deepen our understanding of structural racism.

Points of Contact: Scarlett Bellamy, Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion and Renee Moore, Director of the Biostatistics Scientific Collaboration Center

Need for Shared Resources on Neighborhood Measurement: Data on social determinants of health are often derived from the American Communities Survey and the US Census. These data, derived from resident and household characteristics, are used to understand the social determinants (e.g., racial/ethnic, economic, education, employment) across neighborhoods. Other data sources provide information on the physical determinants of health within neighborhoods including supportive resources (e.g., healthy food sources, recreational and healthcare facilities) and adverse influences (e.g., redlining, air pollution). As attention to unequal opportunities to be healthy depending on where one lives is growing, the plethora of data sources and ways to construct measures is challenging to navigate. Those new to working with neighborhood measures can benefit from a curated guide to the options, facilitating selection of available approaches to meet their current data needs, or creation of new approaches to fill a key niche.

What is Spatial Polarization: One complex but important type of neighborhood measurement that is particularly relevant to studying health disparities is spatial social polarization (SSP). The Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) is a commonly used indicator of spatial social polarization which measures the extent to which a population is distributed at the extremes of deprivation and privilege of socioeconomic characteristics within a geographic area. This is highly relevant to studying not just the intensity but also the unequal health effects of population distribution patterns such as racial residential segregation. SSP indices are critical for understanding the role of racial and socioeconomic segregation in shaping health disparities because they are predictive of neighborhood differences in residents’ health, outperforming commonly used area-level socioeconomic indices.  Established SSP indices can be meaningfully expanded to measure area-level structural SSP, allowing researchers to address policy-relevant questions about how place affects health.

Proposed Project: We propose to collaboratively create an online resource to guide the selection of measures of racial segregation and spatial social polarization for research and implementation. Providing annually updated online resources for these measurements will support observation, mapping, and action planning in urban communities. Making this information available to health researcher and practice audiences has the potential to support efficient and cohesive efforts toward addressing inequities by providing new knowledge on the role of spatial social polarization in health disparities while clarifying and identifying the distinct area-level characteristics that perpetuate the unequal burden of adverse health outcomes. The aspiration is to create an online resource that serves as a quick-start guide that we wished we had earlier in our own learning, that we and those with related interests can use to onboard new team members, and that others can use to get oriented to the point where they can themselves question common practice and thus elevate standards rigor and relevance to action.

Student role and support: The student would actively engage in the creation of draft online materials, gather input and feedback from experts and potential users of the online resource, and plan for an annual update process. The student would be supported by a team that meets weekly, including faculty, staff, and students. The selected student would have opportunities to contribute to envisioning and implementing creation of an online resource, actively participate in presentations and discussions, and use feedback as an inspiration for revisions and future planning.

Student selection and main point of contact: Gina Lovasi will be the main point of contact, working closely with Jody Bayer, Edwin McCulley, and Hoda Abdel Magid of Stanford. Dr. Lovasi (or her delegate within this team if needed to facilitate scheduling) will work with the selection committee and participate in the selection process for Fellows. Dr. Abdel Magid will provide substantive expertise on SSP literature and measurement.

Deliverables (with flexibility to be shaped by the selected student):
1. Website mock-up
Envision and prototype an online resource of racial segregation and spatial polarization measures (building on a resource for food environment measurement developed by Edwin McCulley, who will provide guidance)
2. Work plan for an annual refresh
Literature search guide (databases and search terms for both peer-reviewed and grey literature)
Student engagement models or expansion strategies
3. Audience outreach plan
Webinar, conference abstract, manuscript, and/or blog post sharing to academic and practice audiences

Point of Contact: Gina S. Lovasi, Ph.D., MPH, Dornsife Associate Professor of Urban Health

ABOUT
The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements & Population Health Equity, Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University unites diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally. The Ubuntu Center addresses ways in which structural racism and inequities impact health. The meaning of the center, Ubuntu “I am…because we are” truly embraces the essence of what we stand for. Working collectively, we will achieve a just future, free from systems of oppression, full of new possibilities through bold, collective action, and an equitable world in which all individuals and communities are healthy and thrive.

THE NEED
The Ubuntu Center is rooted in the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; the state-sanctioned violence by law enforcement in 2020, most notably the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd; the resulting protests that were sparked globally; and the renewed sense of urgency around racism as a public health crisis.

OUR APPROACH
Partnering with faculty, staff, movement fellows, global constituents, and community members, we will work together to connect antiracism and population health scholarship and action locally and nationally to ongoing work happening in other parts of the world. We will provide dedicated spaces for rigorous, transdisciplinary research and bold collective action designed to address racism and eliminate racial health inequities. Here’s how:
1. Advance transdisciplinary, anti-racist population health research training and scholarship.
2. Bridge relationships to build critical consciousness and power for health equity and racial justice.
3. Expand collective action for population health aligned with the principles and practices of community organizing and social movements.
4.Strengthen capacity and sustainability to maximize our impact.