In Conversation with Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba

Dr. Cozier is an investigator on the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) and the BWHS Sarcoidosis Study at the Slone Epidemiology Center. Her research interests include social and genetic determinants of health in African-American women — specifically, the influence of psychosocial stressors (e.g., racism, neighborhood socioeconomic status), and genetics in the development of cancer, cardiometabolic, and immune-mediated diseases (sarcoidosis, lupus). Additional research interests include oral health, and the role that religiosity/spirituality and the faith community, particularly the black church, plays in health promotion/disease prevention in the Black community.

Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba serves as Research Associate Professor at BUSPH in the Department of Health Law, Policy & Management. She has secondary appointments with the School of Public Health’s Department of Community Health Sciences and Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics. She is also Executive Director of Children’s HealthWatch, a research and policy network focused on achieving health equity for young children and families through advancing research to transform policy. She has worked in program, policy advocacy, and research roles related to social drivers of health, especially food, housing, and energy insecurity, for more than two decades. Her work documents how policy choices impact young children and their families’ health and ability to afford basic needs. Her particular research and policy interests include intersections of immigration and social policy and the ways that environmental conditions, like extreme heat, interact with material hardships to affect early childhood well-being and their parents’ physical and mental health.