New Lecture Series Focuses on Science and Health Equity

Implementation of recommendations by the CUIMC Task Force for Addressing Structural Racism in the Health Sciences includes a lecture series to raise awareness of racial/ethnic health disparities and their solutions, accelerate research, train and nurture future researchers for this work, and help develop a network of researchers and scientists who focus on this work.

The Office of Faculty Professional Development, Diversity and Inclusion hosts the presentations in the new Columbia Science and Health Equity Lecture Series. The inaugural event on Jan. 26 was presented by Eliseo Perez-Stable, MD, director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the NIH, who spoke on “National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Framework.”

The series will connect Columbia scholars with scholars from other institutions whose work focuses on key aspects of health inequity, with a goal to build and incentivize transdisciplinary collaborations among health disparities researchers.

Other lecture topics will cover COVID-19 and populations of color; the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research model for integrating the impact of disparities into all community participative research; space/place-based determinants of disparities; epigenetics and molecular mechanisms in health care disparities; the role of genomics, genetics, and precision medicine in addressing health disparities; and social determinants of health.