Lab Members

Whitney (she/her/hers) is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department. After completing her MPH at YSPH in 2020, she joined the Housing and Health Equity Lab, directed by Dr. Danya Keene. 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 research will focus on how housing displacement due to extreme climate events 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.

Shannon Whittaker is a doctoral candidate in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. Her research interests lie at the intersection of place, race, health and history where she examines how social, structural, and political processes such as gentrification impact the health of marginalized communities of color, in particular Black communities. Most of her current work evaluates how systemic forms of racism, discrimination, and dispossession have evolved and how these systems of oppression affect neighborhoods and their residents. Before Yale, she worked in healthcare advertising at Omnicom Health Group, tv and film production at Atlantic Pictures, and as a health policy coordinator for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.