Date
Friday, May 19, 2023
Time
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PT/ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm ET
Location
Online: via Zoom
Title
About the Event
The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health at UCLA hosts a Distinguished Quarterly Speaker Series during each quarter of the academic year. For Spring 2023, we invite you to join us for this engaging panel discussion titled “Addressing Racism & Health Inequities from within an HBCU,” featuring Dr. Bita Amani (Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science) and Dr. Monica Ponder (Howard University).
Dr. Bita Amani is a social epidemiologist whose focus is on the synergies and tensions between systems, criminalization, and community health. Her work investigates how social disinvestment and state-sanctioned violence result in public health crisis. Her practice is focused on solutions that expand and strengthen existing community health infrastructure and is in partnership with grassroots organizations that address issues of social injustice. She is an Associate Professor at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) in the Department of Urban Public Health (DUPH). At CDU, she has founded and lead numerous initiatives such as the Cuban Health Exchange, the UCLA/CDU COVID-19 Racism and Equity Task Force, and the CDU Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence (BMHCE).
Dr. Monica L. Ponder is an Assistant Professor of Health Communication & Culture in the Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies (CCMS) within the Cathy Hughes School of Communications at Howard University. Her research interests examine organization-level approaches to public health and crisis communication practice, particularly those centering a radical Black feminist lens. She is the creator of The Henrietta Hypothesis, an interdisciplinary model for public health crisis communication. Dr. Ponder is also the co-Principal Investigator of Project REFOCUS (Racial Ethnic Framing of Community-Informed and Unifying Surveillance). Project REFOCUS (PR) conceptualized and developed a novel set of tools communities can use to monitor and address how stigma and racism affect COVID disparities with the goal of creating a more effective response to COVID-19 and other public health crises in a community. Ultimately, Dr. Ponder aims to advance traditional health communication practice from operating solely at the individual-level of behavior change into one that centers cultural perspectives and environmental context in its design.
