Loretta Ross, cofounder of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and Whitney Robinson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health will discuss issues at the intersection of race, medicine, and reproductive justice. 

This public dialogue is the 2018 spring public event of the Georgia Tech Race & Biomedicine Working Group. It was organized in collaboration with the Black Feminist Think Tank.

This event is supported by the Georgia Tech College of Sciences and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, as well as Spelman College. 

About the Speakers

Loretta J. Ross is a visiting associate professor at Hampshire College in Women's Studies  for the 2017-2018 academic year, teaching "White Supremacy in the Age of Trump." She was a cofounder and the national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005 to 2012. The network was founded in 1997 for women of color and allied organizations that organize women of color in the reproductive justice movement.  

Ross is one of the creators of the term "reproductive justice," coined by African-American women in 1994 after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. More information about Ross is available here.

Whitney R. Robinson is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research activities revolve around disparities in breast cancer, development of obesity, epidemiologic methods, and health disparities by gender, race, and ethnicity.

For example, she studies how and why rates of obesity and cancer differ among racial groups. Why do black American girls have greater obesity risk than black boys? Why do breast cancer rates differ between black and white women?

More information about Robinson is available here.

About the Race & Biomedicine Working Group
Established in 2015, the working group aims to build intellectual common ground among researchers from diverse disciplines. Through its activities, the working group hopes to spark interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaborative research on race and racism in contemporary biomedicine. 

The working group is funded by the College of Sciences and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.