Susan Egerter, PhD

Susan Egerter, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Co-Director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health (CSDH) at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work focuses on applying epidemiologic methods in policy-relevant studies of socioeconomic and racial-ethnic inequalities in maternal and infant health and health care, and on translating findings from that research to inform public health policy and practice through collaboration with local, state and national stakeholders and decision-makers. Dr. Egerter currently is project director of CSDH’s ongoing collaboration with the California Department of Public Health Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Program (CDPH/MCAH) to evaluate its Black Infant Health Program (BIH) serving low-income African-American pregnant and parenting women, and of a W.K.Kellogg Foundation-funded project aiming to further improve African-American maternal and infant health outcomes by supplementing core BIH program activities with interventions that more intensively address key social determinants of health. She also serves as a senior epidemiologist for California's Maternal and Infant Health Assessment (MIHA), an annual statewide representative postpartum survey conducted since 1999 by CDPH/MCAH in collaboration with CSDH. Dr. Egerter was co-director of research for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s recent Commission to Build a Healthier America, which highlighted the role of social factors in shaping health and health disparities in this country, and project director and co-investigator on an Aetna Foundation-funded study exploring racial/ethnic disparities in cesarean deliveries in California. Dr. Egerter received her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University, and trained as a perinatal epidemiologist at Yale University, where she received a PhD in chronic disease epidemiology in 1986. She first joined the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF in 1987 as a postdoctoral fellow in health services research.