Our Team | Racial Trauma and Health Lab

Meet our team!

Dr. Staggers-Hakim

Dr. Staggers-Hakim is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, racism, oppression, and health. Dr. Staggers-Hakim examines the impacts of social stratification/inequality, environmental injustice, and more recently police brutality on health outcomes in racial ethnic, low income, and marginalized populations. More recently, her research has considered state sanctioned and community violence on health outcomes in African American / Black and Latino communities. Her current scholarship assesses the exposure to racism on health behaviors and coping strategies in African Americans. Staggers-Hakim’s work has appeared in the Journal of Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Praeger Handbook of Environmental Health, and Western New England Law Review. Her book Profiled Life: A Systems Approach to Understanding the Foundations and Persistence of Racism in America (2022) considers outcomes experienced by people of color, including mortality/morbidity, academic achievement, income and wealth, prison rates, and infectious and chronic disease occurences, through the lens of social systems.