David R. Williams, the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will discuss “Reducing Racial Inequity in Health: The Fierce Urgency of Now” on Tuesday, Feb. 8, from noon to 1 p.m. CT. The virtual event is the 2022 Satcher Lecture sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Master of Public Health Program.
Williams, also a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, conducts research addressing how race, stress, socioeconomic status, racism, health behavior and religious involvement can affect health. He has served on 10 committees for the National Academy of Sciences, including the committee that prepared the Unequal Treatment report. He has played a national leadership role in raising awareness of the problems of health inequities and identifying interventions to address them. This includes his service as the staff director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America and as a key scientific adviser to the award-winning PBS film series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? His research has been featured in national print and television media and in a TED Talk.
For more than 10 years, the David Satcher Public Health Scholars Program has provided tuition support to Vanderbilt MPH students from under-represented backgrounds. The program honors Satcher’s commitment to eliminating health disparities for racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
The Satcher Lecture is presented as part of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Flexner Deans’ Lecture Series.