Samantha Gailey

Samantha Gailey
  • 1855 Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Equity
  • Nature and Health; Neighborhood Effects; Housing; Residential Mobility; Perinatal Epidemiology
  • Department of Forestry, CS Mott Department of Public Health
  • Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics

WEBSITE

https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/samantha-gailey

BIOGRAPHY

Samantha Gailey is 1855 Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Equity in the Department of Forestry and C.S. Mott Department of Public Health. Her research, teaching, and outreach are informed by a commitment to environmental justice and an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theories and methods from epidemiology, psychology, and geography. Dr. Gailey's work focuses on understanding how inequities in access to neighborhood resources contribute to, and perpetuate, health disparities and how these place-based inequities can be remedied. Her methodological approach to examining neighborhood effects emphasizes causality, leveraging natural experiments and longitudinal cohorts to investigate whether exogenous changes like the creation of a new green space or a novel housing policy influence community and population health. She combines this causal approach with the use of large secondary datasets (e.g., state-level birth cohort files) and innovative primary data collection techniques (e.g., GPS tracking, ecological momentary assessments, cortisol sampling) to understand both the overarching population health effects of place-based initiatives, and the underlying biopsychosocial mechanisms that reflect daily lived experiences.

AREA OF EXPERTISE

  • Nature and Health
  • Neighborhood Effects
  • Housing
  • Residential Mobility
  • Perinatal Epidemiology