Dr. Ford is Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health. Prior to joining UCLA, she completed postdoctoral training in Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholar. Overall, Dr. Ford’s research: (1) examines relationships between racism-related factors and disparities in the HIV care continuum; and, (2) advances the conceptual and methodological tools for studying racism’s relationship to health disparities.

She serves the profession widely. In 2016, she was named to the National Academy of Medicine Committee on Community-based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and appointed co-chair of the Committee on Science of the American Public Health Association’s newly formed Anti-Racism Collaborative. Previously, she served as President of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues. Currently, she is a member of the Minority Affairs Committee of the American College of Epidemiology and Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.