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Faculty

Sarah Gehlert, Ph.D.

- Biography
- Publications

Biography

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 Associate Director of the University of Chicago's NIH-funded Institute for Translational Medicine and co-chairs its Community Translation Science Cluster. She is a Chicago investigator on the NICHD-funded National Children's Study. 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 was Core Leader of the Health Disparities and Communities Core of the CDC-funded Chicago Center for Excellence in Health Promotion Economics from 2004 to 2007.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 Quadrennial 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 "Targeting Health Disparities: A Model Linking Upstream Determinants to Downstream Interventions" and "Early Life Conditions and Mechanisms of Population Health Vulnerabilities" in recent special issues of Health Affairs and "Mammary Cancer and Social Interactions: Identifying Multiple Environments that Regulate Gene Expression throughout the Life Span" in a 2005 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, recently was published 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." She has a special interest in the biology of women's behavior, and recently published "The Prevalence of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder" in Psychological Medicine.

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.

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Publications
  • Gehlert, S., Murray, A., Sohmer, D., McClintock, M., Conzen, S. & Olopade, O. In press. The importance of transdisciplinary collaborations for understanding and resolving health disparities. Journal of Health and Social Policy.
  • Gehlert, S. & Sohmer, D. In press. "Cancer, adulthood, and later life." In Encyclopedia of the life course and human development, ed. D. Blanchfield. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage Learning.
  • Paskett, E.D., Reeves, K.W., McLaughlin, J.M., Katz, M., Sheck McAlearney, A., Ruffin, M.T., Hughes Halbert, C., Merete, C., Davis, F., & Gehlert, S. In press. Recruitment of minority and underserved populations in the United States: The Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities Initiative. /Contemporary Clinical Trials/.
  • Suskind, D., Kenna, M. & Gehlert, S. In press. "Special considerations in working with children from lower socioeconomic status families." In Clinical management of children with cochlear implants, ed. L. Eisenberg. Plural Publishing.
  • Gehlert, S., Mininger, C., Sohmer, D., & Berg, K. 2008. (Not so) gently down the stream: Choosing targets to ameliorate health disparities. Health & Social Work, 33: 163-167.
  • Gehlert, S., Sohmer, D., Sacks, T., Mininger, C., McClintock, M. & Olopade, O. 2008. Targeting health disparities: A model linking upstream determinants to downstream interventions. Health Affairs 27: 339-349.
  • Gehlert, S., Song, I.H., Chang, C.-H., Hartlage, S.A. 2008. The prevalence of premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Psychological Medicine, www.journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PSM.
  • Holmes, J.H., Ferketich, A.K., Hade, E., Lehmann, A., Gehlert, S., Rauscher, G., Abrams, J. & Bird, C. 2008. Challenges to multi-level health disparities research. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 35,/S182-S192.
  • Salant, T. & Gehlert, S. 2008. Collective memory, candidacy, and victimization: Community epidemiology of breast cancer risk. Sociology of Health and Illness 30(4): 599-615.
  • Warnecke, R.B., Oh, A., Gehlert, S., Lurie, N., Rebbeck, T., Paskett, E., Tucker, K., Goodwin, J., Flack, J., Hiatt, R., Kerner, J., Heurtin-Roberts, S., Abeles, R., Tyson, F. & Patmios, G. 2008. Approaching health disparities from a population perspective: The NIH centers for population health and health disparities. American Journal of Public Health, 98,/1608-1615.
  • Gehlert, S., Rebbeck, T., Lurie, N., Warnecke, R., Paskett, E., Goodwin, J., Tucker, K.L. & Flack, J. 2007. Cells to society: Overcoming health disparities. National Cancer Institute, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Gehlert, S., Furumoto-Dawson, A., Gehlert, S., Sohmer, D., Olopade, O. & Sacks, T. 2007. Early life conditions and mechanisms of population health vulnerabilities. Health Affairs 26: 1238-1248.
  • Grushko, T., McClintock, M., Conzen, S., Gehlert, S., Masi, C. & Olopade, O. 2006. Mechanisms of environmental influence on mammary gland cancer gene expression: Achievements and prospects of research. Postmethodika 7: 274-280.
  • Grushko, T., McClintock, M., Conzen, S., Gehlert, S., Masi, C. & Olopade, O. 2006. Biological consequences of psychosocial isolation: A report of interdisciplinary team research. Scientific Bulletin Melitopol State Pedagogical University, Pedagogics Melitopol 7: 63-75.
  • Gehlert, S. & Browne, T.A., eds. 2006. The handbook of health social work. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
  • Gehlert, S., Kovac, K., Song, I.H. & Hartlage, S.A. 2006. "Understanding the mental health services use of rural women." In Rural women's mental health: Mental, behavioral, and physical issues, eds. R.T. Coward, L.A. David, C.H. Gold, H. Smiciklas-Wright, L.E. Thorndyke & F.W.Vondracek, 147-162. New York: Springer Verlag.
  • Gehlert, S., Chang, C.-H., Bock, D.R. & Hartlage, S.A. 2006. Development and validation of a women's quality of life questionnaire (WOMQOL). Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 59: 525-533.
  • McClintock, M., Conzen, S., Gehlert, S., Masi, C. & Olopade, O. 2005. Mammary cancer and social interactions: Identifying multiple environments that regulate gene expression throughout the life span. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences Special Issue 1: 12-23.
  • Chang, C.H. & Gehlert, S. 2003. Psychometric evaluation of the Washington Psychosocial Seizure Inventory (WPSI) using the Dichotomous Rasch Model. Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy 12: 261-267.
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