Seminar Featuring Tiffany Ford & Jill Norris

Tiffany N. Ford is an Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. There, she teaches graduate-level qualitative research methods courses and a course that is free and open to the public on the historical and contemporary understanding of structural determinants of health in the United States. Dr. Ford is also a nonresident fellow with the Center on Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution.

In her research, Dr. Ford uses qualitative, quantitative, spatial, and mixed methods approaches to study Black people’s subjective well-being, or self-reported quality of life, over the life course. Specifically, she examines (1) how anti-Black structural racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the resources that contribute to subjective well-being, (2) what people are doing about that unequal distribution, and (3) how community-centered research strategies can lead to more equitable public policy. Ultimately, Dr. Ford is interested in place-based policy and practice interventions to support a good quality of life. Her work is shaped by her relationships with community-based organizations, community-led coalitions, and individuals most harmed by structural oppression in Chicago and throughout the nation. Dr. Ford was awarded a two-year Robert Wood John Foundation grant through the Health Equity Scholar for Action program to support her research and career development.

Previously, Ford was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution and a Health Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Politics of Race, Immigration, Class and Ethnicity Research Initiative at Cornell University.

She earned her PhD in Policy Studies, with a concentration in Social Policy, from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, where her dissertation won the Innovative Research Award. Before her PhD, Ford worked as a policy analyst in Chicago, where her policy research and advocacy centered on the local safety net and state health workforce. She has an MPH from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and a bachelor’s in Human and Social Development and Economics from the University of Miami.

Subjective well-being, or self-reported quality of life, and the resources that contribute to it (i.e. the determinants of subjective well-being) are unequally distributed in U.S. society. This talk will focus on Dr. Tiffany N. Ford’s research journey and her ongoing project, “Exploring subjective well-being, power, and policy for people racialized as Black in Cook County, Illinois,” a mixed methods community-based participatory action research study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Equity Scholars for Action program. The study aims to explore how structural racism distributes the resources that it takes to be well and elucidate feasible policy and practice pathways to advance well-being and racial equity for people racialized as Black in Cook County. This project was designed and is being conducted in partnership with Chicago United for Equity (CUE), a racial justice movement organization in Cook County, Illinois that organizes multisectoral local actors across neighborhoods, institutions, and policy issues to transform residents’ relationship to power. Using spatial analysis techniques, this project examines the racialized distribution of subjective well-being and the determinants of subjective well-being throughout the County. Through interviews, document review, and observation, this study also explores the policy and practice strategies that the CUE community of local organizers use to build and break power to address unequal access to the determinants of subjective well-being for people racialized as Black in the county.

Jill Norris received a BA in Biology from Colgate University in 1986 and an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology in 1988 and 1990, respectively, from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. In 1990, she started as a research assistant professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, she is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Colorado School of Public Health and was named University of Colorado Distinguished Professor in 2024. Dr. Norris’ research has focused on the relationship between genes and environment in the development of autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and multiple sclerosis. Her work is focused on investigating the role of maternal, infant, childhood, and adult dietary factors in the etiology of disease in at-risk populations using epidemiologic, metabolomic, genetic, and epigenetic approaches. Dr. Norris has been a member of the Society of Epidemiological Research (SER) since 1987 and is an elected member of the honorary American Epidemiological Society. She received SER’s Noel Weiss and Tom Koepsell Excellence in Education Award, the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health Distinguished Alumni Award for Research, and the American Diabetes Association’s Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology.