Racial health inequalities revisited: The toxic burden of cultural racism

Margaret Hicken is a tenure-track research assistant professor at the Institute for Social Research. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained as a social demographer and social epidemiologist. She has devoted her career to the explication of the ways in which structural foundations are embodied in racial health inequalities by linking sophisticated contextual and survey-based exposure measures to biologically-plausible markers and mechanisms of health. Under her research program umbrella, she maintains a number of interrelated research projects. For example, she is a leading scholar at the novel intersection of social stress and vulnerability to environmental toxicants with her research providing evidence to support the concept that racial health inequalities can be largely explained by exposures to both of these social and environmental hazards. She has begun to examine these exposures simultaneously with respect to molecular changes that underlie numerous chronic health conditions. She is also currently using her five-year K01 career development award from the National Institutes of Health to develop her expertise in statistical and population genetics to examine the notion that racial residential segregation, rather than genetic predisposition, is a necessary component to racial inequalities in chronic kidney disease. She has published her work in the top journals in environmental epidemiology and toxicology, epidemiology, health policy, and public health. She has also presented her research to members of the Congressional Black Congress in order to inform policy changes. Today, she will be presenting some of her work from a their area of her research in which she examines the burden of cultural racism on racial health inequalities.