Global Journalism Fellow in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto; Freelance Writer
About
Akilah Wise is a global journalism fellow at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and freelance writer in Atlanta, Georgia. She previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health where she examined place-based correlates of HIV risk-related behaviors among people who inject drugs. Dr. Wise work centers on using reproductive justice to examine inequities in reproductive health and HIV in the United States. She received her PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan where she was a National Institutes of Health-funded predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies Center. At the Population Studies Center, she examined the social construction and structural context of unintended pregnancy using an interdisciplinary ecological model, specifically analyzing the association between early life educational advantage and pregnancy intention in adulthood among U.S. women. Prior to Emory University, Dr. Wise was a research fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she examined the association between incarceration and HIV among at-risk heterosexual men and women using surveillance data. She has written about health inequities for The Nation, Rewire, Emory Health Digest, SPARK, and the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College.
Current Work:
Akilah is currently working on manuscripts that examine the association between place-based characteristics and HIV-related outcomes, e.g. exchange sex and incarceration, and the health services environment for people who inject drugs.
Research area keyword(s):
Structural determinants; reproductive health; HIV; racial health disparities; social environment
