The Case Comprehensive Cancer Center will host its next seminar series event, featuring Derek M. Griffith, associate professor of medicine, health and society and director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt University. Griffith will present “Context, Challenges & Considerations for Reducing Cancer Risk among African-American Men.” The seminar will be held today (Friday, Jan. 19) at noon in the Wolstein Research Building Auditorium.
Speaker details
Griffith is the founder and director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt University. The Center for Research on Men’s Health is one of the first university-wide centers in the country that focuses on men’s health. Launched in September 2016, the center has the three-pronged mission of improving men’s health, reducing unjust differences in health among men and improving the health of African-American men and other men in the U.S. and across the globe.
At Vanderbilt, Griffith also is an associate professor of medicine, health and society and has secondary appointments in the departments of American studies, health policy, medicine and sociology.
He is a social scientist, trained in clinical-community psychology and public health, specializing in understanding and addressing social determinants of racial, ethnic and gender disparities in health through an intersectional lens. Griffith specializes in examining and promoting African-American men’s health, and he also studies how racism affects population health and public health institutions.
He currently is conducting two interventions:
- A randomized-controlled trial of the first individually tailored weight loss intervention for African-American men, which was funded by the American Cancer Society; and
- The first psychologically and biologically tailored weight loss intervention for African-American and Latino men as part of a National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities-funded study on precision medicine and health disparities.
About the series
This interdisciplinary seminar series addresses cutting edge clinical, translational and basic research topics in cancer, with a focal point of the educational and inter-programmatic activities of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center.