Faculty Fellow
Caroline Efird, PhD
Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy
Georgetown University
Caroline's Story
Dr. Caroline R. Efird (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Health at Georgetown University. Her research, publications, and teaching focus on addressing social and structural drivers of racialized health inequities. She has almost a decade of experience doing community-engaged research which combines public health, social science, and humanities-based methods to address and ameliorate issues related to structural racism and whiteness. She holds a Ph.D. and MPH in Health Behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health. Prior to her career in health equity research, Dr. Efird earned a B.S. in Elementary Education from Appalachian State University and she worked with children and families in public schools and non-profit settings for over 9 years.
Caroline's Research
Listening for Health: Exploring connection, community, and well-being as a way to improve healthcare delivery in DC
The Listening for Health project applies the method of oral history to capture stories of connection, community, and well-being from D.C. natives, with the intent to document community history and improve healthcare delivery. As experts on their own lived-experiences, lifetime D.C. residents will share oral history interviews which capture personal and family history, intergenerational health knowledge, perceptions of community-level strengths, and personal experiences with local healthcare systems. These oral history interviews will become historical artifacts for future generations and will be stored in an archive at the DC History Center. In addition to scholarly and public-facing publications, Listening for Health will culminate in a public event where narrators, community members, university students, healthcare providers, and local healthcare leaders will be invited to listen and learn from DC natives’ experiences with healthcare systems.