Health Equity
Samuel P. Martin, III, MD Memorial Lecture with Emily Wang, MD, MAS
Achieving Health Equity Requires Ending Mass Incarceration
Open to Penn affiliates
Mass incarceration’s disproportionate harm on Black communities places it as a feature of structural racism. But efforts in criminal justice reform do not address the structural conditions that perpetuate high incarceration rates in certain communities, including health. Reform efforts also largely ignore how the health system can address the harms of mass incarceration—directly and indirectly—for the most impacted communities. Dr. Wang will discuss interventions based at Yale’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice that harness the expertise of formerly incarcerated individuals to address mass incarceration’s effect on health.
Please note: In-person attendance at this event is preferred. Virtual access will be provided to registrants who are unable to be on campus.
Speaker
Emily Wang, MD, MAS
Professor, General Medicine; Professor, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences; Director, SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, Yale School of Medicine
Emily Wang, MD, MAS is a Professor in the Yale School of Medicine and directs the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. The SEICHE Center is a collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School working to stimulate community transformation by identifying the legal, policy, and practice levers that can improve the health of individuals and communities impacted by mass incarceration. She leads the Center’s research program, the Health Justice Lab, which receives National Institutes of Health funding to investigate how incarceration influences chronic health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and opioid use disorder, and uses a participatory approach to study interventions which mitigate the impacts of incarceration.
As an internist, she has cared for thousands of individuals with a history of incarceration and is co-founder of the Transitions Clinic Network, a consortium of 40 community health centers nationwide dedicated to caring for individuals recently released from correctional facilities by employing community health workers with histories of incarceration. Dr. Wang has served on the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine’s Health and Incarceration Workshop, Means of Violence Workshop, and the Steering Committee on Improving Collection of Indicators of Criminal Justice System Involvement in Population Health Data Programs. Her work been published in the Lancet, JAMA, American Journal of Public Health, and Health Affairs, and showcased in national outlets such as the New York Times, NPR, and CNN. Dr. Wang has an AB from Harvard University, an MD from Duke University, and a MAS from the University of California, San Francisco.
Co-hosted with the Division of General Internal Medicine, and the National Clinician Scholars Program.