Provost’s Forum for Breaking Boundaries: Social Determinants of Cancer

Dr. Adam Perzynski is a tenured Professor of Medicine and Sociology in the Center for Health Care Research and Policy in the Population Health Research Institute at MetroHealth and Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Perzynski is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. His doctoral degree is in sociology and his research includes: novel strategies to eliminate health disparities, outcomes measurement over the life course and mixed methods research. In addition to more than 300 publications and presentations on aging, social factors and health he edited Health Disparities: Weaving a New Understanding with Case Narratives (2019), co-authored Structural Equation Modeling for Health and Medicine (2021) and co-edited Racism, Microaggressions, and Allyship in Health Care (forthcoming 2024). He is co-principal investigator of the Digital Twin Neighborhood study, funded by the US National Institute on Aging, which is examining health differences across neighborhoods in mid-life and developing technologies for creating synthetic populations using electronic health record data. He teaches research methods at CWRU has multiple health information technology inventions. His recent work endeavors to create, optimize and analyze biosocial data resources that facilitate ecological developmental inquiries in cancer prevention and treatment. His combined work represents a career long effort to infuse the study of biomedical scientific problems with the knowledge, theories and methods of social science.