Cross-cutting Themes of Policy, Practice, Race, Culture, and Ethics

Description

The long-term goal of C2S is to reduce health disparities through new research findings that improve practice and policy. Research programs that are grounded in our interdisciplinary framework can lead to more precise and cutting-edge knowledge to inform interventions and policy in the United States.

Issues of race, culture, and ethics traverse all of our research initiatives. Health disparities based on racism and cultural exclusion carry profound ethical and political implications. Measures of social status, for instance, are embedded in diverse socio-cultural contexts that shape their connections to health.

Cultural beliefs may generate resistance to biological measures and standard research procedures; cultural factors may also be sources of resilience that attenuate the effects of adverse environments.

Scientists must also consider responsible uses of race and ethnicity in biomedical, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical research. Race as a scientific category for research reinforces the belief that races are genetically distinct, when in fact they are not. Yet, the use of racial categories in health research can uncover the social origins of racial and ethnic disparities. C2S is dedicated to tackling these and other ethical dilemmas in health research.

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Research Projects

Legal and Political Approaches to Race Consciousness in Biotechnology Research
Principal Investigator: Dorothy Roberts

This NSF-funded project uses legal theories of racial equality to analyze the relationship between the emergence of race-based biotechnology and political contests over race consciousness in social policy. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scientific interest in race-based genomic variation that has yielded biotechnology research and products that may reinscribe the biological nature of race.  This project situates the emergence of race-based biotechnologies within the political struggle over colorblindness and race consciousness, linking debates about the validity and proper use of race as a category in science, law, and social policy. This project will contribute to biotechnology research and to public policy by helping scientists, policy makers, and the broader public better understand the social implications of race-based biotechnologies in the context of political and legal debates about racial equality.  The ethical framework it proposes will provide practical guidance to researchers and policy makers charged with determining the proper role of race as a scientific category.  

Biological Thought: A Cross-Cultural View
Prinicipal Investigator: Sandra Waxman

This series of studies addresses fundamental issues in the evolution of biological knowledge and reasoning, across cultures and across development. Years of research have suggested that the very concepts that adults hold as central (e.g., alive, animal), may be represented in an altogether different fashion in children. However, this research has been limited primarily to majority culture children being raised in western industrialized societies. (MORE)

Cognitive, Affective, and Behavior Dynamics of Interracial Contact
Principal Investigator: Jennifer A. Richeson

Current work in this area by Richeson builds upon previous research suggesting that increased contact between members of different racial groups can be accompanied by unintended, negative consequences for both whites and racial minorities. Richeson and her colleagues have found that in addition to being a source of stress, interracial interaction can also undermine cognitive performance. (MORE)

Pluralistic Ignorance and Intergroup Contact
Principal Investigators: Jennifer A. Richeson, J. Nicole Shelton

In this project, Richeson and Shelton are exploring whether "pluralistic ignorance," or the belief that one's attitudes are different from those of a group when they are actually the same, causes people to avoid contact with members from another racial group. Their results have shown that both blacks and whites attribute their inaction to initiate intergroup contact, in this case sitting down at a cafeteria table with a group composed exclusively of members of the other race, to a fear of rejection. (MORE)

Racial Bias and Mental Illness Stigma as Risk Factors for Mental Health Problems
Principal Investigator: J. Nicole Shelton; Co-Investigator: Jennifer A. Richeson

Past research has shown that contending with issues of racial bias can have a negative effect on the mental health of ethnic minorities. For instance, experiences with racial bias over time have a cumulative, negative impact on ethnic minorities’ subjective well-being. Many scholars have argued, however, that contemporary racial bias has changed; contemporary bias is thought to be more subtle than more “old-fashioned” and blatant forms of racial bias and is often unintentional and unconscious. (MORE)

Psychological & Physiological Implications of Managing a Stigmatized Identity
Principal Investigator: Jennifer A. Richeson

Research suggests that racial minorities and members of other low-status groups may not benefit as much from intergroup contact and diversity, compared with members of dominant social groups (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). Given the widespread social, societal, and organizational benefits of increased diversity in educational and employment domains, however, it is important to examine stigmatized individuals’ experiences as they attempt to persist and even succeed in the face of token status and negative group stereotypes. (MORE)

Interracial Contact, Psychobiological Response, and Health
Principal Investigator: Sophie Trawalter

Sophie Trawalter received her Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in 2006. Her dissertation work investigated the behavioral dynamics of interracial contact. Specifically, this work re-conceptualized behaviors during interracial interactions as coping reactions to stressful encounters. During her postdoctoral fellowship with Northwestern’s Department of Psychology and the Institute for Policy Research, she plans to explore how stress and coping in response to interracial contact affect short-term psychobiological processes (e.g., cortisol levels) and long-term health outcomes of both White majority and ethnic minority group members, working closely with C2S faculty member Jennifer Richeson.

Center for Families after Cancer
Director, Basic Sciences: Teresa K. Woodruff

A robust and new initiative that has grown out of Center for Reproductive Research at Northwestern University is the Center for Families After Cancer (CFAC). The Center for Families After Cancer at Northwestern University is the first of its kind in the United States to bring the possibility of an "egg bank" to cancer survivors. In joining clinical care with fundamental discovery in the reproductive sciences, CFAC provides options to women, men and girls who may lose fertility because of life-preserving cancer treatment. Perhaps the most novel treatment proposed is the preservation of that will preserve female child reproductive potential in much the same way as the female adult program described above. CFAC hopes to offer parents of female children with cancer the option to preserve some of their daughters' ovarian tissue. This may allow women who would otherwise face a life of infertility as a result of a childhood cancer to have their own children.

Regulation of Ovarian Follicle Growth During the Mammalian Reproductive Cycle
Principal investigator: Teresa K. Woodruff

The primary focus of Woodruff's laboratory is to understand the biological, cellular, and molecular mechanisms that regulate the reproductive axis. Hormones and locally produced growth factors of the gonads, pituitary, and hypothalamus interact to maintain reproductive cyclicity in the female and tonic sperm production in the male. The specific focus of the laboratory at this time is the female reproductive axis. The lab's approach requires an integrated view of the axis as a whole; however, emphasis is placed on ovarian-regulated events. Woodruff's team seeks to understand the hormonal signals produced by the ovaries, the mechanics of follicular growth, the hormonal and neuronal effectors of follicle selection and maturation, the factors involved in the development of oocytes, the events surrounding follicle wall rupture and wound healing, and the interplay between oocyte and somatic cells. Their scientific approach toward an understanding of ovarian-directed reproductive events is to identify and study factors produced by the ovary that regulate local and distal events.

Center for Reproductive Research
Director: Teresa K. Woodruff

Woodruff is Director of one of the National Institute's of Health's Specialized Cooperative Centers Program in Reproduction Research. She has gathered researchers in biochemistry, molecular biology, basic biology and reproductive medicine to form the Center for Reproductive Research at Northwestern University (CRR). With Woodruff as the Director, this $5.6 million NICHD funded center is discovering new solutions to infertility in genetics, hormonal research, and ovarian follicle engineering. CRR's goals are to further the understanding of ovarian follicle development; to expedite the transfer of research findings to clinical care by aligning expert scientists with medical specialists; and to develop a method to preserve germline in women and girls undergoing life-preserving but fertility-threatening cancer treatments. Center scientists will work closely with physician researchers at Feinberg with the eventual goal of transferring basic biological research findings to clinical care and medicine.

Artificial Environments to Sustain Immature Follicle Cells
Principal Investigators: Teresa K. Woodruff, Lonnie Shea, Ralph Kazer, John Zhang

As one of the major projects at the Center for Reproductive Research, Woodruff and her colleagues are investigating the creation of egg or oocyte banks which would allow women undergoing chemotherapy to preserve their reproductive potential. Mature eggs that are frozen cannot be used for infertility treatments because they are almost always destroyed in the freezing process. Immature eggs can be frozen, but they need an artificial environment that allows them to mature to the point where they can be fertilized successfully. Woodruff is working with Lonnie Shea, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and infertility specialist Ralph Kazer, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, to develop strategies to provide the synthetic environment needed to support the maturation process.

Crystallographic studies of Reproductive Molecules
Principal Investigator: Theodore Jardetzky; Co-investigator: Teresa K., Woodruff

A project directed by Theodore Jardetzky, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology, in collaboration with Woodruff, involves solving the crystal structures of molecules that play a vital role in reproduction. Images of these molecules have been created in three dimensions, using X-rays produced by the Synchrotron Research Center at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. The team hopes that by learning how molecules regulate genes and assemble structurally, scientists may be able to design drugs to help infertile women in whom these molecules are faulty.

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