Sarah Gehlert, PhD

Teaching experience
Dr. Gehlert’s teaching focuses on the health of vulnerable populations, health disparities, interventions to ameliorate disparities, and community-engaged research. Since her arrival at the Brown School in 2009, she has co-taught Cross-Cutting Themes in Public Health. During her 19 years on the faculty at the University of Chicago, Dr. Gehlert taught a range of courses. These included the health disparities portion of a transdisciplinary course entitled Health Promotion Economics. In the School of Social Service Administration, she taught a number of courses, including the Maternal and Child Health Research Seminar and Social Work Interventions in Health Care.

Related Research
Dr. Gehlert’s research centers on the social influences on health, especially the health of vulnerable populations, and health disparities, women’s health and mental health, and gene and social environment interactions. Her research interests include how place and sense of place influence biology and clinical health outcomes. 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. She has a special interest in the biology of women’s behavior, and conducted a large prevalence study of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. 

Dr. Gehlert's CV