Professor of Medicine, Health & Society
Founder and Director, Center for Research on Men’s Health
Dr. Derek M. Griffith is a Professor of Medicine, Health and Society, and he is the Founder and Director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt University. Trained in psychology and public health, Dr. Griffith’s program of research focuses on developing strategies to achieve racial, ethnic and gender equity in health. He conducts research in four interconnected areas:
- Applying the concepts of intersectionality and manhood to men’s health;
- Conceptualizing institutional racism, men’s health disparities, and men’s health equity;
- Developing and testing individually-tailored and precision lifestyle medicine interventions to prevent and control obesity and chronic diseases in African American and Latino men; and
- Devising and testing organizational-level interventions to address racism in public health and medical practice.
Dr. Griffith is a contributor to and editor of two recent books – Men’s Health Equity: A Handbook (Routledge, 2019), and Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional (APHA Press, 2019) – and he has co-authored or provided expert review of reports from the American Psychological Association, Promundo-US, and the World Health Organization. He has been the principal investigator of research grants from the American Cancer Society, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, several institutes within the National Institutes of Health, and other entities. Dr. Griffith is a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Men’s Health, Ethnicity & Disease, Health Education & Behavior, the International Journal of Men’s Social and Community Health, and Public Health Reports, and he has been a guest editor of six journal special issues or supplements.
Dr. Griffith has collaborated with colleagues in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States on various research projects on health equity, men’s health, institutional racism in public health, and racism as a determinant of health. Dr. Griffith received the Tom Bruce Award from the Community-Based Public Health Caucus of the American Public Health Association in recognition of his research on “eliminating health disparities that vary by race, ethnicity and gender”, and he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior for his significant contributions to the field of health behavior research.