Winship researcher Lauren McCullough, PhD, MSPH, is part of an international team that received a $25 million grant to help address cancer disparities in populations of African ancestry.
A Winship researcher is part of an international team that was awarded a $25 million grant to help address cancer disparities in populations of African ancestry.
Lauren McCullough, PhD, MSPH, a researcher with the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University and an associate professor of epidemiology at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, is a member of the winning research team SAMBAI (Societal, Ancestry, Molecular and Biological Analyses of Inequalities) that will investigate the determinants of health, environmental exposures, genetic contributions and tumor biology to understand the complex interactions between genetics, environment and social factors in cancer outcomes.
This team of researchers from across the United States, Ghana, South Africa and the United Kingdom will be led by Morehouse School of Medicine's Melissa B. Davis, PhD, and will also focus on breast cancer, particularly among Black women.
“Quantifiable measures of social and structural determinants of health are severely lacking in African nations. We are excited to build a robust database that captures these data and can be used to inform health equity more broadly,” says McCullough.
The grant is funded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute through Cancer Grand Challenges, which supports diverse teams of world-class researchers in uniting and thinking differently to take on some of cancer's toughest challenges.