Centers

Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Ph.D., assistant professor, Columbia University, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Kwate’s research centers on determinants of African American health, with particular attention to individual level experiences of identity and inequality, and the intersection of these variables with more distal structural factors. She is particularly interested in determinants of dietary behavior and food environments.

Dr. Kwate trained as a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of children and adolescents and during graduate school, she studied the cultural construction of psychiatric disease classification, the cultural context of clinical practice, and the impact of racial/cultural identity on mental health. Her work in the psychiatry departments of large New York City hospitals brought home the extent to which low-income African American and Latino families were burdened with chronic illness including overweight/obesity, and this led to a postdoctoral fellowship in cancer prevention and control. Dr. Kwate has published papers on culture and mental health practice, African American racial/cultural identity, the role of perceived racism in negative health outcomes, and on determinants of African American neighborhood features. She is currently the Principal Investigator of several studies on African American health.