Lab Members

Whitney (she/her/hers) is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department. She is training to be a mixed-methods social epidemiologist, conducting policy-relevant research on housing and health equality through the lens of two growing concerns: climate change and income inequalities.

She has conducted research with the Housing and Health Equity Lab since 2020, working 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.

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.

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.