Past Award Winners – Diverse and Inclusive – Society for Epidemiologic Research

2025 Diverse and Inclusive award Winner

Eric Rubenstein

Eric Rubenstein, PhD, ScM is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. His work is focused on improving the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), including Down syndrome (DS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Epidemiology, the science of public health, is the crucial tool that can help reach the ultimate goal of improving health and well-being for the population with IDD. That work cannot be done without input and collaboration from the IDD community, which motivates and drives the work to be impactful and translatable.

Dr. Rubenstein’s work covers issues that impact health and well-being across the life course for people with IDD. He is currently the PI of a National Institute for Child Health and Human Development study of pregnancy in women with IDD. He has extensive work examining phenotype and service type in children on the autism spectrum. Dr. Rubenstein uses Medicaid data to examine service use and health outcomes for people with IDD who are often served by the public insurance system.

She also currently serves as the Director of the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity which launched November 11, 2021. The Ubuntu Center’s mission is to unite diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally.

Dr. Barber’s empirical work and academic commentary has been published in leading academic journals including the Lancet, the American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science and Medicine. Over the past 5 years, she has served as Principal Investigator on several externally funded research projects and has secured funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Heart Association. She also serves as a co-investigator on several collaborative research projects including the Pan-American Data Initiative for the Analysis of Population Racial/Ethnic Health Inequities— PAN-DIASPORA—designed to examine the availability, quality and scope of data collected and used on racial/ethnic inequities in urban areas in the Pan- American region. Dr. Barber has lectured and taught nationally and internationally about the impact of racism on health inequities and serves on the Racial Equity Advisory Board for the Lancet.

During the COVD-19 pandemic, Dr. Barber provided expert commentary on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black communities for local, national, and international media outlets including the NY Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR and Al Jazeera. In March 2020, she convened a group of public health experts from Harvard (FXB Center for Health and Human Rights), UCLA (Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, and Health), and other academic institutions across the country to serve as an advisory committee to the Poor People’s Campaign, providing justice-centered public health expertise for the movement as it engaged in collective action and advocacy.

Dr. Barber received a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Bennett College.

2024 Diverse and Inclusive award Winner

Brittany Charlton

Dr. Brittany Charlton is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in the Department of Population Medicine and at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology. The focus of Dr. Charlton’s research is on health inequities among sexual and gender minorities, particularly related to reproductive health and cancer. The second focal area of her research is contraception use and family planning among people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Her research has sustained continuous funding for the last decade from the NIH and foundations, including the American Cancer Society. She has been the Principal Investigator on 18 grants, including her most recent NIH-funded R01 award, focused on sexual orientation-related disparities in obstetrical and perinatal health. Additionally, she collaborates with colleagues across the globe on a host of large-scale studies. Dr. Charlton has published over 75 original research papers including in JAMA, BMJ, and the American Journal of Public Health.

2023 Diverse and Inclusive award Winner

Sharrelle Barber

Dr. Sharrelle Barber is a social epidemiologist and scholar-activist whose research focuses on the
intersection of “place, race, and health” and examines the role of structural racism in shaping health and racial/ethnic health inequities among Black communities in the United States and Brazil.
Through her empirical work, she seeks to document how racism becomes “embodied” through the neighborhood context and how this fundamental structural determinant of racial health inequities can be leveraged for transformative change to advance anti-racism solutions.

Dr. Barber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. Read more

2022 Diverse and Inclusive award Winner

Lorraine Dean

Dr. Dean is Associate Professor in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a social epidemiologist, her work focuses on privilege and health, including social (racism, discrimination, social capital) and economic (consumer credit, socioeconomic position) determinants of disparities in cancer and HIV. She has led several studies in this area as PI of NIH and Center for AIDS Research grants. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in Social Epidemiology from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Her early career opportunities as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, which she completed in 2003 as a first-generation under-represented minority college student, paved the way to a year in Venezuela conducting breast cancer research under the J. William Fulbright Program. Prior to her time on faculty, she coordinated over $14 million of activities in both State- and federally-funded tobacco control initiatives in Philadelphia which led to a reduction in smoking for 25,000 residents. Thus, her research is inspired by building the evidence-base on which policies are made for those at risk of chronic disease.