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Dr. Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH, MPH is a public health scholar, educator, and poet who integrates social epidemiology, participatory research, and creative arts to advance health equity. He engages critical, Black feminist, and decolonial theory and methods to pursue procedural and epistemic justice and advance antiracist praxis within public health research/practice, including via satire/humor, music, and poetry. Central to this work are considerations of structural racism, White supremacy, and settler colonialism as germane to matters of (mis)representation and narrative power within public health research, practice, and pedagogy. His applied research integrates social epidemiology and CBPR/YPAR to improve empirical and conceptual understanding of place and health. This includes the development of a STEAM-based high school curriculum/training program with youth of color focused on social determinants of health, participatory research, and creative arts—yHEART^PDX, the youth Health Equity and Action Research Training program. Core to this collaborative work is centering poetry as both a legitimate form of knowledge acquisition/expression, and an indispensable mode/space of healing and resistance for youth of color to counter dominant narratives.

Dr. Petteway’s scholarship and creative works have been honored with multiple Society for Public Health Education paper of the year awards (2021, 2022), a health data visualization prize from the American Association of Geographers (2019), a national poetry month prize (2020), and a Pushcart Prize nomination (2020), amongst other honors. His research has appeared in a range of top-tier public health journals, including Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Urban Health, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, and Health Education & Behavior. And his poetry—much of which explicitly names and centers antiracist and decolonizing praxis as integral to health equity research, discourse, and action—has appeared in both peer-reviewed public health and traditional poetry journals, including Health Affairs, Health Equity, Health Promotion Practice, International Journal of Epidemiology, Critical Public Health, Kithe Journal, and Bellevue Literary Review. In advancing this work for the broader field, he co-founded and serve as an associate editor for the first-ever standing poetry department in a peer-reviewed public health journal.

Prior to his doctoral training, Dr. Petteway served as social epidemiologist and chief epidemiologist for the Baltimore City Health Department. Before that, he sat on bench-backs and sipped “orange drink”, listening to Mobb Deep while conducting observational studies of project life. #FirstGen. He still reps The Ville. –  www.rjpetteway.com