HIV Working Group

Jessica Cerdeña, Ph.D.
Medical Anthropologist and Family Physician in Training, Yale School of Medicine

“Advancing Health Justice through Race-Conscious Research”

ABSTRACT: Achieving equitable outcomes for oppressed and socially stigmatized communities—including people living with HIV—requires conscientious and rigorous science. This discussion will center on how to enact race-conscious data science, emphasizing the role of racism, rather than race, in determining health disparities. This talk will address questions regarding data collection, terminology, analytical strategies, and implications for clinical practice and policy advocacy. By developing more critical ways to interrogate the impact of racism on infectious disease, participants will disrupt the perpetuation of racial essentialism in biomedical research and call for increasingly reparative and liberative reforms.