At the Intersection of COVID and Critical Race Theory: Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP)

Department of Epidemiology Seminar Series

Open to the public

Speaker

Chandra L. Ford, PhD
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
Founding Director, Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA

Dr. Chandra L. Ford is Professor of Community Health Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She is lead editor (with Derek Griffith, Marino Bruce and Keon Gilbert) of Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional (APHA Press, 2019), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 by the American Library Association’s Choice magazine. She earned a doctorate in Health Behavior from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and completed postdoctoral fellowships in Social Medicine (at UNC School of Medicine) and Epidemiology (at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), the latter as a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholar.

Her work offers conceptual and methodological tools for studying racism as a public health problem. She originated (with Collins Airhihenbuwa) the Public Health Critical Race Praxis, which is an approach for applying Critical Race Theory empirically. Much of her empirical work examines inequities in HIV testing, care and prognoses, or documents barriers to services among LGBTQ survivors of intimate partner violence. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, the Boston University Law Review, the Du Bois Review, Ethnicity & Disease, JAIDS, Social Science & Medicine, and other peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Ford has received many teaching awards and several notable honors, including the 2020 Wade Hampton Frost Award from the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Black Women Physicians, a TrueHero Award from TruEvolution and the 2019 Paul Cornely Award from the Health Activist Dinner group.