Lab Members

Whitney (she/her/hers) is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department. She is a researcher with the Housing and Health Equity Lab Whitney has worked on multiple projects in the lab, including Project ReSIDe, a mixed-methods, longitudinal R01 investigating the impacts of rental assistance and diabetes, and the COVID Eviction Project, a series of interviews investigating the impacts of rental moratoria during the pandemic. She is committed to understanding how housing can impact mental and physical health equity. Her dissertation aims to identify how housing displacement due to extreme climate events and eviction impacts individual and community health.

Leah is a PhD student in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She previously completed her MPH in Health Policy at Yale School of Public Health and worked for several years in the NYC Department of Homeless Services. Her research focuses on understanding the ways in which housing and homelessness policies can both contribute to and be used as a tool to reduce health disparities.

Kyra Rost is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research interests broadly include black pop culture, intergroup-conflict and cooperation, health outcomes, and criminology. Her current research focuses on using hip-hop music to combat mental health stigmas, enact reliance, and influence health policy. Kyra has earned the Distinguished Graduate Enrichment Fellowship and the Patrick S. Osmer Fellowship from The Ohio State University’s Graduate School.

Patrick is a PhD candidate in Community Health and Prevention at Drexel University. His research explores the intersections between housing and health inequity, with a particular focus on understanding and documenting the health impacts of eviction. His dissertation research uses mixed methods to examine how eviction influences the management of stress-related chronic diseases within New Haven and nationally. Prior to his doctoral studies, Patrick worked as a primary care nurse at Fenway Health and as a monitoring and evaluation officer with Partners In Health-Lesotho.

Carolyn Swope is a doctoral student in urban planning at Columbia University, and also holds an MPH in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University. Broadly, her research interests focus on the relationship between housing and health disparities, with particular attention to historical housing policies producing present-day housing inequities. Currently Carolyn is working on her dissertation, which examines how gentrification’s connection to other forms of racialized dispossession informs its effects on health for Black residents in Southwest Washington, DC.