Lab Members

My research broadly explores how social policies contribute to health inequality, with a particular focus on issues related to housing and place. For example, my prior research has examined how urban revitalization and public housing demolition affect the health of low-income African American communities in Chicago, Atlanta and nationally.

My research has also examined linkages between home foreclosure, mortgage strain and health. I am also interested in social stigma and its relationship to geographic and social inequality. For example, my work has examined negative representations of place or ‘spatial stigma’ as an understudied mechanism that connects places to the health of their residents. In my current work, I am using qualitative interviews and nationally representative data to examine relationships between affordable housing access and type 2 diabetes self-management and control. 

I received my PhD in Public Health from the University of Michigan and was an RWJF Health & Society Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kim is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Associate Dean of Research in American University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the social determinants of health and structural interventions to address them. More specifically, she has focused on race, class and gender inequality as they intersect with processes of community disruption in analyzing HIV related inequities and their implications for prevention interventions.

Whitney is a post-graduate associate with ReSIDe. She is committed to understanding how assistance programs and anti-discrimination policies can promote mental and physical health in communities.

Denise Esserman joined the Yale School of Public Health faculty in 2014 as an associate professor of biostatistics. She is interested in methods related to clustered randomized trials and the impact of the ICC and other factors on calculating sample size. As a member of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences, she collaborates with a number of departments at the Yale School of Medicine, including the Clinical and Translational Science Award Program, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Cancer Center. She has reviewed articles for the American Journal of Epidemiology, Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology; Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research; Clinical Trials; and Obesity. Esserman earned her doctorate at Columbia University and has since taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Andrew is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Penn State and an affiliate faculty member of the Population Research Institute. A sociologist and demographer, Andrew studies health disparities, population health, policies and health, and methods.

Annie Harper has a PhD from Yale University in cultural anthropology. She conducts research on how vulnerable populations, particularly low income people with mental illness, cope with poverty and financial difficulties, and how to support them in this area. She is particularly interested in understanding how the financial services and retail industries could better serve low income people generally, and people with mental illness in particular. She is committed to combining rigorous research with practical work that makes a difference now, to which end she works closely with the City of New Haven and the broader community’s efforts to provide support to low income residents struggling with financial difficulties. She is originally from the UK, but has lived for many years in New Haven with her husband, who is originally from Pakistan, and their three children.

Dr. Lipska is an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine and a Clinical Investigator at the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). Her research program seeks to better understand the balance of benefits and harms of glucose-lowering therapy in older adults with type 2 diabetes. Her current research projects are primarily focused on severe hypoglycemia. She is investigating trends in admissions for hypoglycemia among the elderly Medicare population; race, sex, and age disparities in these admissions; using qualitative research methods to explore reasons for hypoglycemia admissions; examining key risk factors for hypoglycemia; and developing prediction models for hypoglycemia. Based on these data, she seeks to develop and implement decision support tools to help clinicians and patients make better decisions about their care. Her overall goals are to generate data that patients and clinicians need—data which currently do not exist—so that they can make better, smarter treatment decisions.

In addition, Dr. Lipska works at CORE on the development of ambulatory care quality measures for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). She is currently leading the development of an outcome measure of care quality among people with diabetes mellitus.

YCCI Scholar 2013

Project: 11/01/13 - 10/31/15

Treatment-Related Determinants of SevereHypoglycemia in Type 2 Diabetes

Alana is Project Manager of the Justice, Housing & Health Study (JustHouHS) and previously of the Structures, Health, and Risk Among Reentrants, Probationers & Partners (SHARRPP) project. She has managed several mixed methods research studies and is particularly interested in qualitative and participatory research methods aimed at better understanding structural barriers to health.

Penelope is the Project Manager for ReSIDe.  She has worked on a variety of research projects that examine structural inequalities and health disparities.  She is interested in the promotion of social justice.