Director: Rachel T. Kimbro Associate Director: Justin T. Denney
Associate Professor of Sociology Assistant Professor of Sociology
Our program is dedicated to fostering community and academic partnerships surrounding issues of health, health care, education, and community planning by highlighting how urban areas can create barriers as well as opportunities for the health of their citizens.
UHP will accomplish its mission by:
- Connecting scholars conducting health research and community health organizations in Houston
- Facilitating interdisciplinary health research
- Convening on-campus dialogues on issues relevant to urban health
The Urban Health Program is a campus-wide program of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Sign Up for the UHP Mailing List
If you are interested in receiving updates from the Urban Health Program, please click here or email urbanhealth@rice.edu.
.jpg "moving up 2") Moving up: Kinder Institute Urban Health Program Director Rachel Tolbert Kimbro and Associate Director Justin Denney are shown here at the program’s new offices inside the Rice University Bioscience Research Collaborative, 6500 Main Street, Room 170.
Urban Health Program air pollution study goes mobile
An interdisciplinary collaboration between atmospheric scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston and Rice sociologists will study how and where air quality in Houston affects the health of citizens.
The researchers, led by Rob Griffin, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, will spend two years roaming the streets in a mobile laboratory to gather data on particulate matter (PM) — aerosol pollutants smaller than 2.5 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in diameter. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), particles smaller than 10 micrometers can find their way deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream, where they can affect the heart.
Click here to read more.
Married opposite-sex couples have better overall health than same-sex couples who live together
Same-sex couples who live together have worse health than married opposite-sex couples and similar health as opposite sex couples who are living together (after adjusting for socioeconomic differences), according to a new study from researchers at Rice University, including Justin Denney, Kinder Institute Urban Health Program associate director. Read more about the study here.
Urban Health Program releases childhood obesity study
Research from the Kinder Institute’s Urban Health Program reported that children living in poorer neighborhoods are 28 percent more likely to be obese than their counterparts in more affluent neighborhoods. Program Director Rachel Tolbert Kimbro and Associate Director Justin Denney published “Neighborhood Context and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Young Children's Obesity: Structural Barriers to Interventions” in the journal “Social Science & Medicine.” Read more about their research here.
Urban Health Program releases map, report on Houston-area farmers’ markets
The Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s Urban Health Program released a dynamic new report and interactive map on farmers’ markets within metropolitan Houston. This report is based on a field project conducted with farmers’ markets, co-ops, and other local agriculture initiatives to focus on food access for communities in poverty. The project was conducted over a period of two months and involved fieldwork, internet research, as well as direct discussions with market managers. Since this is intended as the first effort to begin compiling such initiatives in a central location, all markets may not be included. For more information or to share information about additional markets to be added to future updates to this report, please contact the Urban Health Program at urbanhealth@rice.edu.
Download the short report and map here
Download the full report and map here here
Download the map here
The Urban Sandbox
The Urban Sandbox is a blog run by the Kinder Institute which serves an open forum for the discussion of pressing urban issues around the world. Check out the contributions UHP has made to the dialogue
|