Dr. Tiffany N. Younger is a medical scientist in the field of clinical epidemiology where she reimagines health research by centering wealth as a critical determinant of health. Her work investigates how structural inequality, economic trauma, and intergenerational exclusion shape health outcomes for communities navigating the intersection of racism and gender inequity. She designs and evaluates interventions that move beyond identifying disease patterns to addressing the root causes of inequity, including wealth deprivation and systemic racism. Through frameworks such as Complex Economic Intergenerational Trauma (CEIT) and the Black Wealth-Health Framework, Dr. Younger develops evidence-based tools, clinical screeners, and community-rooted research models that bridge medicine, public health, and social policy. Her research advances clinical decision-making and public health practice as pathways not only to improved care, but also to repair, restore, and liberate.
Published Work
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This personal narrative is a critical reflection and affirmation letter to Black women. Throughout this commentary, at the end of each section, I have included what I call “gems”. I hope they serve as a manifesto for our collective healing from working in institutions that center on the ideologies and practices of dominance. This piece particularly focuses on the dominant ideology and practice of “whiteness” within institutions as a surveillance tool through policy that directly impacts Black women’s wellbeing through gender anti-black racism. Through storytelling and drawing on Black feminist scholarship, this narrative exposes the challenges I faced with institutional policies and practices as I pursued my career in both academia and social service work. Throughout this narrative, I highlight how the undercurrent of whiteness is embedded in the foundation of institutional policy and practices. This narrative serves as a demand for institutional accountability and reckoning with the coloniality of epistemology and ontology. There is a great emotional toll for Black women who are confronting and resisting gendered anti-black racism with deep internal struggles and triumphs. The violent institutional practices seek to eclipse Black women’s ability to dream, imagine and create. Whiteness is centered in institutional infrastructure, serves as a distraction, and impedes our ability to conceptualize the world we desire. We deserve to have imagination in our work. This narrative is a reflection of the harm of whiteness, a guide for Black women academics, a manifesto for change, and a testament to our humanity.
Liberating Gender and Race from Coloniality’s Prescriptive Normativity