Leadership
Kristin Z. Black, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Maternal and Child Health and the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She received her MPH and PhD in Maternal and Child Health from Gillings. She also completed the NIH T32-funded Cancer Health Disparities Postdoctoral Program through the Department of Health Behavior at Gillings.
Dr. Black is committed to utilizing community-based participatory research, mixed methods, and racial equity approaches to understand and address individual-level and structural inequities in reproductive health and chronic disease outcomes.
Her research merges three key components. First, Dr. Black explores the connections between reproductive and maternal health and chronic diseases, examining whether these outcomes differ by race, ethnicity, or other social identities. Second, she focuses on understanding which individual- and systems-level factors may hinder or facilitate birthing people’s journey through maternal healthcare services. Third, she is committed to transforming research into action by engaging community stakeholders in implementing and sustaining interventions that tackle health inequities and structural racism.
Dr. Black is Deputy Director of the UNC Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Equity Scholar for Action, a member of the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative (a community-medical-academic partnership), Immediate Past President of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues, and a Qualitative Research Consultant for ResearchTalk.
