Centers

Caroline Mae McKay, MSW, PhD is now Biostatician in the Department of Psychiatry.  McKay is a former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training program at Columbia University. Dr. McKay attended Florida State University’s College of Social Work in Tallahassee, where she graduated with honors with a master’s degree in clinical social work in 1994. Following several years working with the homeless mentally ill veteran population in Miami, she obtained a doctorate in May 2006 in Community and Family Health from the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health, after successfully completing her dissertation entitled “The Role of Social Structural and Social Contextual Factors in Shaping Chronic Disease and Chronic Disease Risk Behavior: A Multilevel Study of Hypertension, General Health Status, and Mental Distress.” Dr. McKay’s research interest is in comorbidity between mental and physical health, the effects of place, and the linking of the two. Currently, her work seeks to disentangle the social and economic processes of wider environments that influence risk behaviors and shape health disparities, with the purpose of better understanding both the role social factors play in influencing individual agency and the personal and collective responsibilities for achieving a more equitable distribution of health. Central to this work in the social and geographic patterning of health is disaggregating interindividual variability in health status from variation between populations, with special interest in the pathways or mechanisms of influence linking the two levels of analysis. With a focus on the role of exposure to pathogenic environments and its conferrance of susceptibility to a host of chronic health conditions, her program of research incorporates multiple levels of the social world, from macrolevel factors to the expression of inequality at the biological level. Two projects she has recently been working on include an NIH R01 grant proposal to link the General Social Survey (1980-2006) to the National Death Index, in order to create a prospective dataset to move social epidemiologic studies of health disparities beyond identification and description to a deeper understanding of underlying mechanisms, paving the way for highly targeted policies to address “health gaps” between groups. She is also collaborating on several projects utilizing the NHANES data, one of which will investigate the role of immigration and social status on biomarkers of toxic exposure and inflammation associated with chronic disease and reduced life expectancy.