Social Inequities in Health: Opportunities and Challenges for Contemporary Christianity
The Duke Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative is excited to welcome Dr. David R. Williams as the inaugural Payne Lecturer in Faith, Justice, and Health Care.There will be an audience Q&A after the lecture, which will conclude at 7:00pm. Visitor parking is available in the Bryan Center Parking Garage. The lecture is free and open to the public.
About the Lecture: Dr. Richard Payne was an internationally esteemed pioneer in pain relief, palliative care, oncology, and neurology. He joined the faculty at Duke Divinity School in 2004 as Director of the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life, the institute that predated and paved the way for the Duke Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative. The Payne Award and Lecture highlights and honors academic, clinical, and lay leaders who in their work and research embody the late Dr. Payne's spirit of caring for the whole person.
About the Speaker: David R. Williams, PhD, MPH, MDiv is the Norman Professor of Public Health and Chair, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also a Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His prior faculty appointments were at Yale University and the University of Michigan. He holds master's degrees in Public Health and Divinity and a PhD in Sociology.
An internationally recognized social scientist, he has authored more than 500 scientific papers and his research has enhanced our understanding of the complex ways in which socioeconomic status, race, stress, racism and health behavior can affect health. The Everyday Discrimination Scale that he developed is the most widely used measure of discrimination in health studies. He has also studied the association between religious involvement and health, directed a national study on forgiveness and health and co-edited (with Loren Toussaint and Everett Worthington) a 2015 book on Forgiveness and Health.
He has played a visible, national leadership role in raising awareness levels of inequities in health, including serving as staff director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America and a key scientific advisor to the award-winning PBS film series, Unnatural Causes: Is inequality Making Us Sick? His research has been featured in the national print and television media and in his TED Talk.