Shine Lecture: Community Health Centers and the Social Determinants of Health

Cheryl Clark, MD, ScD is the Executive Director and Senior Vice President of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers’ Institute for Health Equity Research, Evaluation & Policy (IHE). As the inaugural leader of IHE, Dr. Clark is committed to advancing emancipatory research as part of a health equity movement led by people most impacted by health injustice. Dr. Clark is also Associate Chief for Equity Research and Strategic Partnerships for the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Clark is a physician of Hospital Medicine and a Social Epidemiologist with a research focus on social determinants of health and health care utilization in diverse populations, including preventive care for cancer and cardiovascular disease prevention.

She has extensive experience in Community-Based Participatory Research, and in the implementation and evaluation of innovative strategies to address social determinants of health and care utilization in communities with high burdens of cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. Dr. Clark led efforts to implement social needs screening and closed loop referral operations in partnership with the two hospital-licensed community health centers of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  She received the inaugural Quality and Innovation Award from Partners Healthcare for this work.

Dr. Clark is the PI of the Mass General Brigham Jackson Heart Study Vanguard Center where her group studies multilevel social determinants of cardiovascular risk factors, including social determinants of incident coronary heart disease and metabolic syndrome.  Dr. Clark is PI for engagement of the New England NIH All of Us Research Program where she serves as chair of the Social Determinants of Health Task Force for survey development and have led the demonstration project to validate data on obesity in All of Us.  Dr. Clark has recently joined the NIH PhenX Toolkit consortium as a steering committee member to facilitate harmonization of metrics.

Dr. Clark earned an AB in human biology and an MS in Health Services Research from Stanford University. She also earned an ScD in social epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, followed by an MD in medicine from Stanford University School of Medicine.