Dr. Leia Belt, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts (SSHA) Department of Sociology since January 2024. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD specializing in Medical Sociology and Social Epidemiology from the University of Iowa. Her research is dedicated to quantifying the impact of structural inequalities, with interests spanning various domains, including the examination of structural racism within health, technology, and higher education curricula. Her work is characterized by a Du Boisian mixed-methods approach, with a distinctive emphasis on community engagement and the use of unique and interactive visualizations.

Dr. Leia Belt is an Ignite the Spark Scholars Program (ISSP) fellow through the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE) at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Belt will use the seed funding to explore, understand, and work toward dismantling structural racism through research projects that collect oral histories from elders racialized as People of Color, examining how they conceptualize the relationship between health, race, and place. Additionally, she will lead a collaborative Photovoice project with the Iowa Black Doula Collective and other birth workers in the Midwest. The goal of these projects is both to contribute to her innovative development of a measure of structural racism using sundown town data and to co-create a community engagement initiative around Black maternal health in the Midwest. Professor Yen is an advisor for Dr. Belt’s Ignite the Spark Scholars’ project.