School's 29th Annual Minority Health Conference attracts record turnout (Spring, 2008)

April 28, 2008

Che Smith

More than 600 students, educators and health professionals from across the nation attended the 29th Annual Minority Health Conference on Feb. 29, 2008 at the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education. Another 1,000 people participated in the event via satellite downlink and webcast, making it the largest minority health conference in the history of the event.”I see this as a testament to the priority that has been placed on minority health and issues impacting people of color,” says Janelle Armstrong-Brown, a doctoral student in health behavior and health education who co-chaired the conference with Eboni Taylor, a PhD student in epidemiology. “We look forward to another successful year and for success many years to come.”

The conference’s 10th Annual William T. Small Jr. Keynote Lecture was given by Dr. Nancy Krieger, professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Her lecture, titled “The Science and Epidemiology of Racism and Health in the United States: an Ecosocial Perspective,” addressed how racial inequalities in social conditions become biologically embodied over lifetimes and across generations, creating racial and ethnic health inequities. Krieger is associate director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health and co-director of the HSPH Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender and Health.

This year’s conference was made possible by a lead gift from Bodil and George Gellman. Mr. Gellman is a 1969 graduate of UNC’s Department of Economics. This gift is the largest single contribution from individual donors in the 29-year history of the conference. For more information on the conference, visit www.minority.unc.edu/sph/minconf/2008.

Carolina Public Health is a publication of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. To subscribe to Carolina Public Health or to view the entire Spring 2008 issue in PDF, visit www.sph.unc.edu/cph.