Race & Society
Tyson H. Brown is an associate professor of Sociology, where he holds the W.L.F. endowed chair and directs the Center on Health & Society. His program of research examines the who, when and how questions regarding ethnoracial inequalities in health and wealth.
Brown has authored numerous articles in leading sociology and population health journals, and his research contributions have been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association. In addition, Brown was the inaugural Duke Presidential Fellow, the recipient of Duke University's Thomas Langford Award, and was a resident fellow at Oxford University. He has also been awarded funding for his training and research from the Robert Wood Johnson and Ford Foundations as well as the National Institutes of Health.
Brown is currently working on several projects that investigate macro-level factors and psychosocial mechanisms that underlie social inequalities in health. The first project, "Structural Racism and Health Stratification in the U.S.: Connecting Theory to Measurement," is on the conceptualization and measurement of structural racism and its effects on population health. The second project uses robust analytic techniques to quantify the contributions of socioeconomic adversity and stress processes to ethnoracial inequalities in health.
Professor Brown is actively engaged in service at the university and national level. He has served in leadership position within professional organizations, including on the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America as well as on the editorial boards of top journals such as Social Forces, Demography, Social Psychology Quarterly, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Brown also founded and co-organizes Duke’s Writing and ReseArch Productivity (WRAP) Group, which aims to promote excellence in scholarship and support Black faculty by creating protected writing time and a space that enhances faculty inclusion. In addition, professor Brown enjoys serving as a mentor to Duke students and postdocs as well as to early career scientists through programs funded by Russell Sage and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations to build the pipeline of future scholars.