February 22, 2017 | News | Suessmilch Lecture

Racial Health Disparities in the United States

On February 28, 2017, Jay Kaufman from the McGill University, Montreal, Quebec will give a talk at the MPIDR entitled "Racial Health Disparities in the United States”.

Abstract

Black versus white inequality in health is a long-standing concern in the United States, and has been monitored and studied for decades. The context is somewhat unique from that observed in Canada and Europe because the disadvantaged population are mostly not immigrants, but rather have resided in the country for many generations, albeit for much of that period under a legal regime that enforced unequal rights. I review this literature from a biomedical and demographic perspective, discuss some debates on the scientific principles underlying the research, and present recent findings on heterogeneity between US states on magnitude of inequality in life expectancy and its trends over time.

About the speaker

Jay S. Kaufman holds a doctorate in epidemiologic science from the University of Michigan (1995). After a post-doctoral position at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine (Chicago, IL) from 1995 to 1997, he was Medical Epidemiologist at Carolinas Medical Center (Charlotte, NC) from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 through 2008 he held a positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health at Chapel Hill and as Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center. In 2009 he began his current position as Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Disparities in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec). He is also currently appointed as Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health of the University of Chile. Dr. Kaufman's work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including perinatal outcomes and cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases. He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”. With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology” (2nd Edition, 2017).