Dr. Sharrelle Barber
Dr. Barber serves as the Director of The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity. Launched November 11, 2021, The Ubuntu Center's mission is to unite diverse partners to generate and translate evidence, accelerate antiracism solutions, and transform the health of communities locally, nationally, and globally. She’s a social epidemiologist and scholar-activist whose research focuses on the intersection of "place, race, and health" and examines the role of structural racism in shaping health and racial/ethnic health inequities among Blacks in the United States and Brazil. In her work, she documents how racism becomes "embodied" through the neighborhood context and how this fundamental structural determinant of racial health inequities can be leveraged for transformative change to advance anti-racism solutions. She has lectured and taught nationally and internationally about the impact of racism on health inequities and provided commentary on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black communities and racism as a public health crisis for local, national, and international media outlets including the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, and Al Jazeera, among others. She received a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.
