Fridays at Newcomb:Anita Raj and Kelli Hall, “’Women’s Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Socioeconomic Development:’ A National Academies of Sciences Report”

- Anita Raj is the Executive Director of the Newcomb Institute and the Nancy Reeves Dreux Endowed Chair in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. She is a research scientist trained in developmental psychology and public health with a multi-disciplinary research focus on gender equity in global health and development. She has led federal grant and foundation-funded studies on gender theory and measurement science, sexual and reproductive health, maternal and adolescent health, women’s empowerment, and gender inequalities, including genderbased violence and child marriage. She has approximately 300 peer-reviewed publications and is recognized as one of the most cited social scientists globally. She created and leads the EMERGE platform, which provides open access evidence-based measures on gender empowerment, built indicators on gender empowerment in national surveys for global tracking of SDG5: Building gender equality and empowerment for all women and girls and offers technical assistance to survey researchers and implementers working on gender empowerment. She also created and leads the Violence EXperiences (VEX) study, now operating in California and Louisiana, to assess state-wide data on experiences of violence, discrimination, and mental health, to support data-driven policy decision-making on these issues. She has served as an advisor to UN Women, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Blue Shield Foundation of California, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation on gender equity and health as well as women’s empowerment issues, and she has been an invited speaker at the U.N. General Assembly on child, early, and forced marriage. She is also on the International Advisory Board for Lancet Global Health. She is the Co-Chair of the Committee on Gender Empowerment, Sociodemographic Development, and Population Dynamics for the National Academy of Sciences.

-Kelli Stidham Hall, PhD, MS, is the Associate Dean of Research in the School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, the Thomas Keller Professor in Diversity in the Departments of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences and Epidemiology, and the Co-Director of the Mary Amelia Center for Women’s Health Equity Research at Tulane University. Trained as a social epidemiologist and originally an advanced practice nurse, Dr. Hall's research program addresses the social determinants of and solutions for maternal-child and reproductive health equity in the U.S. and globally. Her work advances policy- relevant, community-engaged, and multi-level interventions through interdisciplinary teams and multisector partnerships. To date, she has raised over $75 million in grant funds to support her collaborative research program, and she currently serves as the principal investigator on five NIH-funded projects focused on studying the effects of health and social policies, poverty, structural racism, health systems factors, and toxic social stress on disparities in maternal morbidity, mortality, mental, and reproductive health. In addition to her leadership roles at Tulane, Dr. Hall is also the Co-Director and MPI of Columbia University’s NIH U54 Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence and the former Founding Director of the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast at Emory University. In 2020, Dr. Hall was elected as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.