Faculty

Sarah Gehlert, Ph.D.

Sarah Gehlert, Ph.D. is the Helen Ross Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and the Institute of Mind and Biology of the University of Chicago. She is the Principal Investigator and Director of the University's NIH-funded Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research and project leader of one of its four interdependent research projects. Dr. Gehlert is also the Core Leader of the Health Disparities and Communities Core of the CDC-funded Chicago Center for Excellence in Health Promotion Economics. Dr. Gehlert directed the University of Chicago's Maternal and Child Health Training Program from 1992-1998 and was Principal Investigator on an NIMH-funded community-based study of rural and urban women's health and mental health from 1997-2001. She serves on the Internal Advisory Committee of the University of Chicago's Cancer Research Center and the External Advisory Committee of its Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Breast Cancer, the Strategy Team of the California Breast Cancer Research Program's Special Research Initiatives, and the Chicago Breast Cancer Mortality Reduction Task Force. Her professional activities also include memberships on the Site Visit Committee of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Professional Advisory Board of the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Chicago, the Research Advisory Council of the Epilepsy Foundation of America, and the steering committee of the Washington Park Children's Free Clinic in Chicago. She was Chair of NIH's 2007 Summer Institute on Community-Based Participatory Research. Dr. Gehlert serves as the President of the Society for Social Work and Research. She serves on the editorial board of Research in Social Work Practice and is a consulting editor of Social Work Research.

Her publications focus on social influences on health, especially the health of vulnerable populations. She currently is working on the influence of neighborhood and community factors, such as community violence and unsafe housing, on psychosocial functioning among African-American women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, with an eye toward how these factors "get under the skin" to affect gene expression and tumorigenesis. Her team published "Mammary Cancer and Social Interactions: Identifying Multiple Environments that Regulate Gene Expression throughout the Life Span" in the March Special Issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, written with M. McClintock, S. Conzen, C. Masi and O. Olopade. A manuscript entitled "Collective memory, candidacy, and victimization: Community epidemiology of breast cancer risk" with Talya Salant, which is being revised for publication in the Sociology of Health and Illness. Dr. Gehlert edited the Handbook of Health Social Work with T.A. Browne, which is published by John Wiley & Sons in December of 2005, for which she wrote chapters entitled "The Conceptual Underpinnings of Health Social Work," "Health Communication," and "Health Behavior Theories.

Professor Gehlert earned a B.A. in Anthropology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, a M.A. in Anthropology and a M.S.W. from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Social Work from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, St Louis.