Biography

Community Health Scholars Program Project: Lance Gravlee worked with the Healthy Environments Partnership (HEP), a community-based participatory research project affiliated with the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center. HEP is focused on the role of air pollution, dietary factors, and stress in shaping racial and socioeconomic disparities in cardiovascular disease in Detroit, with the goal of informing community-based interventions and policy efforts to reduce such disparities. A central aim of HEP is to document how neighborhood and social structural conditions influence social inequalities in heart disease. To that end, Dr. Gravlee joined a team of community and academic partners in developing and implementing a standardized tool for assessing neighborhood conditions in the three HEP study areas. He also developed a parallel project to map the distribution of fundamental social determinants of health, using a combination of ethnographic methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In addition, he was involved with HEP's community outreach and education program (COEP), which aimed to communicate the study's findings both to policy makers and to community members at large. Finally, Dr. Gravlee participated in a writing team from the Eastside Village Health Workers Partnership (ESVHWP) to examine the relationship between perceived discrimination and health in the most recent wave of the ESVHWP survey. One aim of this project was to identify local arenas for developing community-based interventions to reduce racial inequalities in health. Cuurent Activities: In addition to his appointment in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, Dr. Gravlee has affiliate appointments in the College of Public Health and Health Professions, the African American Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American Studies at UF. Dr. Gravlee’s research focuses on social inequalities in health. His current work examines the health effects of racism among African Americans in Tallahassee, FL. He has also done research on the social and cultural influences on high blood pressure and heart disease among people of African descent in Puerto Rico and in Detroit. As part of the Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study, Dr. Gravlee has also examined the health consequences of globalization and culture change among indigenous peoples in the Bolivian Amazon. Dr. Gravlee has expertise in community-based participatory research and is working with community members and university researchers to develop the Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee (HEAT), a community-academic partnership for action-oriented research on social inequities in health.