YSPH SBS Virtual 525 Seminar Series: Mienah Sharif, “Addressing Racism Across the Lifecourse: A Critical Step Towards Health Equity”

Biography: Mienah Sharif is a public health scholar committed to an anti-racist, health equity-driven research agenda. She received her PhD and MPH in Community Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles and BA in government and economics from Smith College. She has received training in population health and community-engaged health disparities research from the California Center for Population Research, the Center for Population Health and Health Disparities, and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. She recently completed a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. Her training informs her global, intersectional and lifecourse approach towards addressing the structural factors that create and sustain social and health inequities. Her publications, to date, have provided both conceptual underpinnings and empirical evidence examining these relationships across multiple health conditions among communities of color including immigrant populations. Currently, Mienah is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health at UCLA where she is applying her training in Critical Race Theory towards developing our understanding of the racialization of religion as a structural determinant of health. Additionally, she is a member of the Center’s COVID Task Force on Racism and Equity. Her work on this Task Force has appeared on CNN and in Teen Vogue. Mienah was recently awarded funding from the Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR program) of the National Institute on Aging to lead a community-driven, family-systems approach towards examining the impact of mass incarceration on the wellbeing of older, Black and Latinx adults.