Chandra L. Ford, a leading scholar in the fields of racism, social justice, and public health, will join the Emory University faculty in January 2023 as a visiting professor in the Department of African American Studies in the College of Arts and Emory Sciences and in the Department of Behavioral, Social Sciences and Health Education at the Rollins School of Public Health.
Ford joins the university from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she serves as professor of community health sciences and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, and Health. Much of her work is devoted to studying the impacts of racism and inequalities on public health and supporting interdisciplinary research to prevent and combat the consequences of racism.
She is the editor-in-chief of Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional, which was selected as a 2020 Distinguished Academic Title by the American Library Association’s Choice magazine. A dynamic and sought-after speaker, teacher, and author, Ford’s contributions to public scholarship are profound. Her brilliance has been recognized by a number of awards, including: the 2020 Wade Hampton Frost Award from the American Public Health Association’s Section of Epidemiology; a lifetime achievement award from the Association of Black Women Physicians; a TrueHero Award from TruEvolution; and the 2019 Paul Cornely Award from the Health Activist Dinner Group.
“Dr. The Ford Fellowship addresses the persistent and devastating impacts of racism on individual and population health,” says Don Operario, Grace Crum Rollins Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Social Education and Health.
“Graduate students across the country are intensely interested in this area of research, including here at Emory,” Operario continues. “Dr. Ford’s pedagogy, research, and community engagement connecting public health and African American studies at Emory will have a transformative effect on the ways we train and guide researchers to understand and address these complex challenges.
“Dr. Ford’s joint appointment with African American studies furthers our department’s embrace of WEB Du Bois’s earliest goals for scholarly production, teaching, and dissemination in our field. African American Studies is a home for interdisciplinary studies that integrate knowledge gained through the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and the expertise and engaged scholarship of Dr. Ford are exemplary in this regard,” says Dianne Stewart, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies and interim chair of the Department of African American Studies. “Our undergraduate and graduate students within and beyond the AAS Department will benefit immensely from her presence in our department as they pursue important pressing issues related to anti-Blackness, racial inequality, health disparities, policy, and other related research areas.”
Ford is the first faculty member to hold a joint appointment between Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health. The Department of African American Studies has added several distinguished scholars to its faculty in recent years and is set to launch a new PhD program in fall 2023 with the first group of graduate students. The program is the first of its kind in the Southeast and the first at a private university in the South.
