Belinda L. Needham

About

Belinda L. Needham, PhD, MA, is a Chair in Epidemiology and Associate Professor at the U-M School of Public Health. Her work seeks to identify, explain, and reduce health disparities related to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual orientation. Her primary research goals involve using novel approaches to assess disparities across the life course and to identify the social structural, psychological, behavioral, and physiological mechanisms by which social disadvantage leads to poor health. Dr. Needham's research interests include social epidemiology, health disparities, biodemography, aging, and the life course. Her projects utilize data from sources such as NHANES to examine DNA methylation as a mechanism underlying racial/ethnic disparities in cardiovascular mortality, and from birth records, newborn dried bloodspots, electronic surveys, and social media to study the impact of indirect exposure to the Flint Water Crisis on Black-White disparities in birth outcomes in Michigan. Additionally, she investigates how state-level racially discriminatory laws influence cardiovascular health disparities using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Her educational background includes a PhD and MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS from Texas A&M University. Dr. Needham's work is focused on understanding and addressing health inequities through social epidemiology and related fields.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Medicine
• Demography
• Geography
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Biology

Selected publications

• Institutional Racism and Health: a Framework for Conceptualization, Measurement, and Analysis

  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities · 2022 · 70 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The relationship of acculturation to cardiovascular disease risk factors among U.S. South Asians: Findings from the MASALA study

  Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice · 2020 · 42 citations

  DOI

• Do black/white differences in telomere length depend on socioeconomic status?

  Biodemography and Social Biology · 2020 · 35 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Social and economic disadvantage are hypothesized to increase the risk of disease and death via accelerated biological aging. Given that US blacks are socially and economically disadvantaged relative to whites, health disparities scholars expected that blacks would have shorter telomere length-a biomarker of cell aging-than whites. Yet the majority of studies have found that blacks have longer telomere length than whites. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n =…

  DOI

• What Elephant? Pedagogical Approaches to Addressing Stigma Toward Mental Disorders in Undergraduate Public Health Education

  Pedagogy in Health Promotion · 2020 · 34 citations

  In the past decade, the number of undergraduate public health programs has increased exponentially. This growth provides a unique opportunity to explore concepts and issues relevant to understanding the determinants of health at a population level using new pedagogical approaches. One of these issues is stigma toward mental disorders. Stigma is a concept that refers to a feature or characteristic that reduces, devalues, and disempowers a person. Given the prevalence of mental and substance use d…

  PublisherDOI

• Vicarious structural racism and infant health disparities in Michigan: The Flint Water Crisis

  Frontiers in Public Health · 2022 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  = 0.6962). The FWC, which was widely attributed to structural racism, appears to have had a greater impact, overall, on outcomes for babies born to Black people. However, given the frequency of highly publicized examples of anti-Black racism over the study period, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the FWC from the effects of other racialized stressors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Race/Ethnicity, DNA Methylation, and Disparities in Cardiovascular Mortality: NHANES 1999-2002

  NIH · $3.1M · 2017–2025

• NIH Grant R01HL101161

  NIH · $4.1M · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Teresa E. Seeman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  45 shared

• Bhramar Mukherjee

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  35 shared

• Jennifer A. Smith

  Virginia Tech

  30 shared

• Elissa S. Epel

  University of California, San Francisco

  27 shared

• Ana V. Diez Roux

  Drexel University

  27 shared

• Nancy E. Adler

  22 shared

• Jue Lin

  University of California, San Francisco

  22 shared

• Sharon L. R. Kardia

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  19 shared

Education

• MA, PhD, Sociology

  University of Texas at Austin

  2006

• BS, Sociology

  Texas A&M University

  1999

Similar researchers at University of Michigan

• Emily Toth Martinh-95
• Briana Mezukh-47
• Sara Dubowsky Adarh-44