McNair Scholar 2021 Hanan Ahmed
Hanan Ahmed is a senior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, majoring in Biology and minoring in Sociology. Her research interests involve the pathology of chronic illness, communal health, and the influence of racism on disease susceptibility for marginalized communities. Ms. Ahmed plans on getting her Ph.D. in Epidemiology.
My dream is to address the underlying influence of racism and inequity in disease and communal wellbeing through a Ph.D. in public health. I want to better understand how environmental stressors translate into disease and improve the health outcomes of my community and others like it.
Research project
Do We All Have the Same 24 Hours?
Abstract: Time, like other forms of capital, is an inequitably distributed resource for marginalized communities of color. The lack of leverage over how and where communities of color can spend their time often results in an average day being dominated by work and limited in leisure and sleep. Existing literature about the cumulative time loss marginalized communities experience centers institutional barriers that siphon away their control and access to time, such as shift work, sleep deficiency, commute schedules, medical care delays, and incarceration. Though many of these studies acknowledge the growing disparity Black and Brown adults experience with time, the time loss Black children struggle with is not as widely acknowledged. This literature review aims to define the institutional restraints on time (e.g. healthcare, socioeconomic status, education, etc.) Black children experience and examine how they translate and exacerbate the inequities in health and wellbeing the Black community faces daily.
Faculty mentor
Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography in 2014. Her research concerns racial disparities in mortality and more recently time use across the life course. Multiple research journals and books have published Dr. Wrigley-Field’s work and she maintains a long list of honors related to her sociological work and engagement. This is her first year as a McNair faculty mentor.