UCLA Fielding School of Public Health | clford@ucla.edu
Chandra L. Ford is Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health in the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her doctorate in Health Behavior from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining UCLA, she completed postdoctoral training in Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina and in Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholar.
Most of Ford’s research falls into two broad categories: (1) empirical studies examining the relationship between specific forms of racism, health inequities and healthcare inequities; and, (2) the development and advancement of conceptual and methodological tools to help researchers who study racism as a public health issue. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, the Annals of Epidemiology, Social Science & Medicine, the Wisconsin Law Review, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Ford is privileged to have received several notable honors and she serves the profession broadly. In 2016, she was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine Committee on Community-based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and named co-chair of the Committee on Science of the American Public Health Association’s newly formed Anti-Racism Collaborative. She serves on the Board of the Yancey Edgeley Fellowship, which was developed to further Antronette “Toni” Yancey’s legacy of promoting physical activity in diverse communities through “instant recess”, and she previously served as president of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues. She serves as a mentor in UCLA’s Center for Healthy Aging in Minority Elders (CHIME) program. In addition to her academic roles, she has been involved with the Black Radical Congress and has partnered with the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders.
