Diverse Voices: Cancer Disparities: Methods and Measurement of Racial and Ethnic Diversity

Date and Time

– January 26, 2023, 4:00 PM EST

Virtual only.

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Event Information

ORWH’s quarterly lecture series, “Diverse Voices: Intersectionality and the Health of Women,” amplifies research that incorporates an intersectional framework and addresses the breadth of topics relevant to the health of women. The next session "Cancer Disparities: Methods and Measurement of Racial and Ethnic Diversity" will feature presentations from Drs. Laura Fejerman and Scarlett Lin Gomez. During the session, attendees will learn about (1) the relationship between genetic ancestry and breast cancer risk in Hispanic/Latina women; and (2) research on cancer in the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) populations focusing on approaches to go beyond racial and ethnic categories to understand cancer patterns and risk, and prognostic factors in distinct groups.

Videocast

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Speakers

Headshot of Dr. Laura FejermanLaura Fejerman, Ph.D., M.Sc.
Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences; University of California, Davis

Dr. Fejerman is a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and leads the Women Cancer Care and Research Program at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and M.Sc. in Human Biology at the University of Oxford, England. Dr. Fejerman completed her undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research focuses on the discovery of genetic and non-genetic factors that contribute to breast cancer risk and prognosis in Hispanic/Latina women. Her past work established a relationship between genetic ancestry and breast cancer risk in Hispanic/Latina women, and she has built upon this observation, exploring genetic variants through admixture mapping and genome-wide association approaches. Dr. Fejerman’s efforts have also focused on addressing disparities in breast cancer prognosis affecting Hispanic/Latina women, and understanding potential causes, including access to information, screening, and care.

Headshot of Dr. Scarlett Lin GomezScarlett Lin Gomez, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Professor, Vice Chair for Faculty Development, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, 
University of California, San Francisco

Dr. Gomez's research focuses primarily on cancer health disparities/inequities and aims to understand the multilevel structural and social drivers of those disparities. As a first-generation Taiwanese American, she understands firsthand the importance of lived experiences in cancer risk and has focused much of her research on providing research data to document cancer patterns in disaggregated AANHPI ethnic groups, and to understand the role of socio-contextual factors and multilevel exposures in affecting these patterns.