Professional Summary
Arline T. Geronimus is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and Associate Director and Research Professor in the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research. She is also affiliated with the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health. Dr. Geronimus received her undergraduate degree in Political Theory from Princeton University, her doctorate in Behavior Sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health, and did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Geronimus developed an analytic framework, "weathering" that posits that the health of African Americans is subject to early health deterioration as a consequence of social exclusion; much of her scholarly work is related to developing and testing this framework. Her general research interests include structural and cultural influences on population variation in family structure and age-at-first birth; the effects of poverty, institutionalized discrimination, and aspects of residential areas on health; the collective strategies marginalized communities employ to mitigate, resist, or undo the harmful effects of poverty and structural racism on their health; and the perturbations public policies sometimes cause in these autonomous protections. Dr. Geronimus directs doctoral training in Public Health Demography at the Population Studies Center. She has worked with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives to revitalize American cities.
Courses Taught
HBEHED614: Women's Health and the Timing of Reproduction
HBEHED693: Seminar on Health and Poverty
HBEHED823: Structural Influences on Health and Social Behavior
Education
Sc.D., Behavioral Sciences, Harvard University School of Public Health, 1985
A.B., Politics, Princeton University, 1977
Research Interests & Projects
Weathering -- causes, impact, and implications from the cellular to the policy level
Social construction of teenage childbearing as a public health or social problem
Urban/rural differences in health among high poverty populations in the U.S.
Impact of social ideologies and public policies on the health of marginalized groups
Selected Publications
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Geronimus, AT (2013). Jedi Public Health: Leveraging Contingencies of Social Identity to Grasp and Eliminate Racial Health Inequality In Mapping "Race": Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research, LE Gómez and N López, Eds,Rutgers University Press, Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series.
Geronimus AT, Snow RC (2012). The Mutability of Women's Health with Age: The Sometimes Rapid, and Often Enduring, Health Consequences of Injustice In Women & Health
Geronimus AT, Bound J, Colen CG (2011). Excess Black mortality in the United States and in select Black or white high-poverty areas, 1980-2000 American Journal of Public Health, 720-729.
Geronimus AT, Hicken MT, Pearson JA, Seashols SJ, Brown KL, Cruz TD. (2010). Do US black women experience stress-related accelerated biological aging? A novel theory and first population-based test of black-white differences in telomere length. Human Nature, 1, 19-38.
Geronimus AT, Hicken M, Keene D, Bound J. (2006). "Weathering" and age-patterns of allostatic load scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 5, 826-833.
Geronimus A.T. and Thompson J.P. (2004). To Denigrate, Ignore, or Disrupt: The Health Impact of Policy-induced Breakdown of Urban African American Communities of Support. Du Bois Review, 1(2), 247-279.
Geronimus, A. T (2003). Damned if You Do: Culture, Identity, Privilege and Teenage Childbearing in the United States. Social Science and Medicine, 57, 881-893.
Geronimus, A.T. (2001). Understanding and Eliminating Racial Inequalities in Women's Health in the United States: The Role of the Weathering Conceptual Framework. Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, 56(4), 133-136.
Geronimus, A. T., Bound, J., Waidmann, T. A., Colen, C. G., & Steffick, D. (2001). Inequality in Life Expectancy, Functional Status, and Active Life Expectancy Across Selected Black and White Population in the United States. Demography, 38(2), 227-251.
Geronimus, A. T. (2000). To Mitigate, Resist, or Undo: Addressing Structural Influences on the Health of Urban Population. American Journal of Public Health, 90, 867-872.
Professional Affiliations
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy
American Public Health Association
Population Association of America
American Society for Applied Anthropology
Charter Member: National Center for Minority Health
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