Tiffany N. Ford

Tiffany N. Ford (she/her) is a nonresident fellow with the Center on Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution and an assistant professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. There, she teaches graduate-level qualitative research methods courses and a course that is free and open to the public on the historical and contemporary understanding of structural determinants of health in the United States.

In her research, Dr. Ford uses qualitative, quantitative, spatial, and mixed methods approaches to study Black people’s subjective well-being, or self-reported quality of life, over the life course. Specifically, she examines (1) how anti-Black structural racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the resources that contribute to subjective well-being, (2) what people are doing about that unequal distribution, and (3) how community-centered research strategies can lead to more equitable public policy. Ultimately, Dr. Ford is interested in place-based policy and practice interventions to support a good quality of life. Her work is shaped by her relationships with community-based organizations, community-led coalitions, and individuals most harmed by structural oppression in Chicago and throughout the nation. Dr. Ford was awarded a two-year Robert Wood John Foundation grant through the Health Equity Scholar for Action program to support her research and career development.

Previously, Ford was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution and a Health Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Politics of Race, Immigration, Class and Ethnicity Research Initiative at Cornell University.

Ford earned her Ph.D. in policy studies, with a concentration in social policy, from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, where her dissertation won the Innovative Research Award. Before her Ph.D., Ford worked as a policy analyst in Chicago, where her policy research and advocacy centered on the local safety net and state health workforce. She has an MPH from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and a bachelor’s in Human and Social Development and Economics from the University of Miami.