Samantha Gailey

Sam joined the MPC as a Population Health Postdoctoral Fellow in 2021. With her background in Social Ecology, she holds interdisciplinary training in epidemiology, psychology, and urban planning. Sam’s research examines social and environmental determinants of health, including how neighborhood conditions “get under the skin”and shape maternal and perinatal health disparities.

Given her focus on neighborhoods and health – relations often biased by selection and confounding – Sam seeks to use novel, innovative approaches to strengthen causal inference.Her interdisciplinary work is motivated by the belief that society’s most intractable problems cannot be solved from the narrow silos of traditional disciplinary perspectives. Whereas her research primarily focuses on health problems in local urban contexts (e.g., food deserts, park access), Sam also has experience analyzing population health data in the Middle East and Scandinavia.