Doctora Anna-Michelle McSorley is a Postdoctoral Associate at the New York University (NYU) School of Global Public Health in the Department of Public Health Policy and Management and the Center for Anti-racism, Social Justice, and Public Health. She is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Fielding School of Public Health.
She received her PhD (2022) and MPH (2018) in Community Health Sciences from UCLA. As part of her graduate training, she also completed a minor in Race, Ethnicity and Politics within the Department of Political Science at UCLA and was a funded UCLA Policy Fellow in the Public Health Training Program on Population Health Advocacy.
Dra. McSorley is a public health scholar, educator, and advocate committed to health equity and social justice. Using interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and mixed methodologies from her training in community health, political science, and public health advocacy, she examines how policies and political processes work for or against the health and well-being of racial and ethnic minority communities in the U.S. More specifically, she focuses on health inequities among Latino/a/x groups and identifies opportunities for solidarity across populations that experience similar structures of exclusion and injustice that contribute to health and health care inequities.
In her current research, she looks at the ways in which the political relationship between United States federal government and the United States territory of Puerto Rico differentially shapes the role of federal public health entities, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and compromises the execution of essential public health functions, such as the collection of population health data for territorial residents. To date, her research has been published in several influential journals, including JAMA Health Forum, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Social Science and Medicine - Population Health.
In her role as an educator, Dra. McSorley works inside and outside of the classroom to promote critical public health scholarship. As the creator of the Anti-Colonialism Collective Book Club, Dra. McSorley advocates for rebellious reading, which involves reading texts that have been banned in classrooms and libraries across the country, as a tool for advancing social justice and racial health equity in public health through monthly readings and book club discussions.
In service to the domestic and global public health community, Dra. McSorley serves on several influential committees. Locally, she advances efforts to center racial health equity as a member of the Racial Equity and Social Determinants of Health team for the New York City Pandemic Response Institute, a city government initiative executed by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health. Complimenting her research efforts outside of the continental United States, Dra. McSorley also serves as a member of the Data Capacity Team for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials to improve the collection and maintenance of public health data across the territories.