Research Interests:
- Structural Racism as a Social Determinant of Health
- Racial Inequities in Chronic Disease Risk, Accelerated Aging, Cognitive Decline, Mental Illness, and Mortality
- Social Policy, Educational Attainment, and Causal Inference
Dr. Thomas is a social epidemiologist investigating the mechanisms by which structural racism contributes to Black–White and other racial inequities in health. Her research evaluates policy effects and emphasizes methods for causal inference in the absence of randomization.
Structural racism—historical and ongoing interactions between macro-level systems and institutions that constrain the opportunities, resources, and power of minoritized racial and ethnic groups—is a fundamental cause of racial inequities in health. Dr. Thomas specializes in developing adequate measurement and statistical methods to capture the mechanisms by which structural racism adversely impacts health.
Dr. Thomas’s research centers on Black experiences (i.e., factors that distinctively characterize Black lives in the US), primarily in three life domains: anti-Black policing, negative racial sentiment or race-based discrimination, and racism in higher education. Her innovative approaches have demonstrated racial patterns in risk of being killed by police, and in law enforcement characteristics related to police killings, as well as how experiences of area-level anti-Black bias, interpersonal racial discrimination, and culturally-specific coping strategies influence health, providing evidence that institutional racism contributes to physiologic stress-regulation and accelerated aging, and that improved socioeconomic position, particularly educational attainment, and racial identity may buffer the biological consequences of racism.
Her current research examines structural racism in higher education, either as public policy or through individual-level educational attainment, as a potential causal driver of Black-White inequities in health. Though structural racism is implicated as a fundamental cause of higher education gaps, little to nothing is known about if, and to what extent, uniquely Black college experiences influence health in Black adults, specifically Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
In 2022, Dr. Thomas received a K99/R00 Award from the National Institute on Aging to study the impact of HBCUs on late-life cognition in Black adults. She is also core faculty at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (https://healthpolicy.ucsf.edu/our-people/faculty) and Co-Director of the SF BUILD program, a partnership between UCSF and SF State to enhance diversity of the biomedical research workforce (https://sfbuild.sfsu.edu/meet-lead-team). Dr. Thomas is an active participant in the UCSF PReMIUM Group (https://integration.ucsf.edu/team), SPHERE Research Group at Harvard University (https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/social-policies-health-equity-sphere/, Glymour Research Group at Boston University (https://sites.bu.edu/glymourgroup/team/), and HEARTS Research Group at UC Berkeley (https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/research/hearts-research-group/).