Amy Kind
Credentials: MD, PhD
Position title: Director, Center for Health Disparities Research (CHDR)
Email: amy.kind@wisc.edu
Dr. Amy J.H. Kind, MD, PhD is the founding Director of the UW Center for Health Disparities Research and the inaugural Associate Dean for Social Health Sciences and Programs at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. In this role she oversees, creates synergies, and guides the growth of the school’s current and future initiatives, policies and programs that are designed to study and eliminate health disparities. She works closely with leaders in research, education, clinical, and public health realms to build capacity and ensure the advancement of health equity research.
Dr. Kind also serves as a resource for connecting basic and clinical scientists with social scientists to facilitate discoveries in social exposome research, a key area in mechanistic health disparities inquiry. As Associate Dean, Dr. Kind serves as Executive Director of the $480 million Wisconsin Partnership Program grant-making endowment and provides oversight to the Milwaukee-based Center for Community Engagement and Health Partnerships. In addition, Dr. Kind is a Professor of Medicine, Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology and serves as Leader of the Care Research Core of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
Dr. Kind is an international leader in the fields of social determinants of health and mechanistic health disparities research, leading the team that developed the Neighborhood Atlas, a free first-of-its-kind data democratization tool that quantifies socioeconomic disadvantage for every neighborhood in the US including Puerto Rico. The Atlas has been accessed nearly one-half million times since its public launch and has found widespread application including in the US Congress, state policy, NIH, CDC, health systems and industry. Most recently the Neighborhood Atlas has been used to inform COVID resource allocation across a number of US States as a direct means towards mitigation of health disparities.
Dr. Kind’s work has had far-reaching policy impact, has been actively promoted by the NIH and published in top journals including The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Kind has earned multiple honors including the NIH/NIA Beeson Award, the American Geriatrics Society Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation, election as a Member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and membership on a White House Task Force on Aging and Technology. Dr. Kind currently leads an NIH research funding portfolio of over $40 million in active grants and is routinely asked to advise state, federal, and international entities. Her most recent NIH grant is a 22-site national consortium (“The Neighborhoods Study”) which will provide a novel window into the mechanisms underlying social exposome exposure and Alzheimer’s Disease neurobiology.