Meet Arline T. Geronimus, ScD

Meet Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Institute for Social Research and a founding affiliate of the UM Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health. Elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine, she received her undergraduate degree in Political Theory from Princeton University, her doctorate in Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health, and postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. She originated the theory of Weathering, positing the price denigrated or exploited social identity groups pay in an unjust society is the health toll exacted from their bodies as they work to survive, cope with, and overcome injustice in their daily round. Through her research, she has explicated and tested the dynamic historical, political, material, environmental, and psychosocial dimensions of weathering as well as the human biological mechanisms through which it exacts its toll on health, from society to cells. She points to the collective strategies marginalized communities employ to mitigate, resist, or undo the harmful effects of weathering; the trade-offs these strategies reflect; the perturbations public policies and ideologies cause in these autonomous protections; and a way forward for promoting health equity. She offers a roadmap toward population health equity through social changes large and small that disrupt the ideologically mediated, social psychological and human physiological processes that activate weathering. 

Don’t miss her David and Rosemary Adamson Excellence in Reproductive Medicine Lecture titled Weathering Inequities and Their Impact on Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes Among Black and Other Marginalized Birthing People in the United States on Monday, October 21, 1:30 – 2:15 PM. Weathering theory posits the health of people who are members of racialized, working class or other systemically denigrated groups, suffers stress-mediated wear and tear at a much faster pace than that of relatively more affluent white people. This is not due to any essential biological differences among racialized or other dominant compared to marginalized groups, but rather to the disparate impacts of enduring structural racism, classism, and stigma on the human biological canvas. Over years, accumulated exposures to environmental toxins, chronic biopsychosocial stressors, and material hardships associated with structured oppressions and the chronic high-effort coping they entail can weaken and dysregulate neuroendocrine, metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune systems; damage and weaken blood vessels; increase allostatic load; accelerate cellular damage; and be manifest in the early onset of chronic diseases of aging, including ones that compromise maternal and infant health during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Weathering Theory and empirical evidence on its implications for maternal and infant health equity will be presented.

Click here to learn more about this plenary lecture:  https://asrm.confex.com/asrm/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/6094