About
Dr. Sharrelle Barber is a social epidemiologist and scholar-activist whose research— situated at the intersection of “place, race, and health”— examines the role of structural racism in shaping health and racial health inequities in Black communities in the United States and Brazil. Through her empirical work, she documents how racism becomes "embedded" in the brick and mortar and social fabric of neighborhoods and how this fundamental structural determinant of racial health inequities can be leveraged for transformative change. As a “Daughter of the South,” the insights from her research and scholarship are shaped by a lifetime of being in communion and community with Black people (to borrow language from bell hooks); bearing witness both to the collective pain endured and the collective power wielded in the face of structural oppression.
Dr. Barber serves as the founding 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. She serves as Principal Investigator on several externally funded research projects including the JHS Neighborhood Change Study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health. Based in Jackson, Mississippi, the study examines how structural racism shapes changes in neighborhood environments over time and the impacts on cardiometabolic outcomes for Black American adults in the Jackson Heart Study. 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), a transnational collaboration with colleagues in Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Cuba, and the United States.
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 and the Commission on Antiracism in Solidarity for the Lancet. She is also the 2023 recipient of the Sherman A. James Diverse and Inclusive Epidemiology Award from the Society for Epidemiologic Research and was recognized by Diverse Issues in Higher Education as an Emerging Scholar.
Through her public scholarship, Dr. Barber has provided expert commentary on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black communities and racism as a public health crisis for local, national, and international media outlets including the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, The Nation and Al Jazeera. At the height of the pandemic, she convened a group of public health experts from the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the 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.