Biography

Paula Braveman, MD, MPH is Professor of Family and Community Medicine and Director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Braveman is nationally and internationally recognized for her research on social disparities in health and her active leadership in bringing attention to this field. A member of the Institute of Medicine, she has studied socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in maternal and infant health and health care for 2 decades. Her work also has focused on developing practical methods for ongoing, policy-oriented monitoring of disparities at local, state, and national levels using routine data sources in the U.S. and other countries. From 1995-1999, she worked with World Health Organization staff to develop and direct a WHO global initiative on equity in health and health care. She is an advisor on health disparities research for the South Africa-based Global Equity Gauge initiative that has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Swedish government. Dr. Braveman?s early research demonstrating adverse outcomes among uninsured newborns broke new ground in the literature on disparities in financial access to care in the U.S. She has studied the role of social factors in disparities in prenatal care, cesarean section rates, low birthweight, preterm birth, and adolescent reproductive health behaviors. She has made conceptual contributions to the international literature on equity in health and on the measurement of equity and socioeconomic status. She has published extensively in scientific journals. She is the director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco. The Center conducts research on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health with the ultimate goal of informing policy to achieve greater equity. A major current project of the Center is to work with staff of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop a proposed national initiative on health equity.