Danielle L. Beatty Moody

Dr. Danielle L. Beatty Moody received a BA in Psychology and completed a Minor in Africana Studies at North Carolina State University, a MA in Psychology at North Carolina Central University, and a PhD in Social Personality Psychology with a Health Psychology Concentration at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She then completed a 3-year NIH/NHLBI Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She took her first faculty position at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in the Department of Psychology, where she was affiliated with the Behavioral Medicine and Community Psychology subprograms and Director of the Social Determinants of Health Inequities Lab. During that first leg of her professional journey, she led ground-breaking work linking interpersonal discrimination with brain assessed via magnetic resonance imaging and acquired over $1,500,000 in grants and awards including the prestigious 5-year Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award from the NIH/National Institute on Aging, in addition to becoming the first African American woman to obtain tenure in her unit. Dr. Beatty Moody is a health equity scholar; her expertise is in the study of racism as a key social determinant of accelerated and disparate health inequities in the African American community across the lifespan. She leads an interdisciplinary research program that centers health inequity as a chief social justice issue in the United States. The ultimate objective of her work is to inform, promote, and collaborate on multilevel interventions and policy transformation to mitigate entrenched social and health ills in marginalized communities. Her theory-driven research program is anchored by biopsychosocial, socioecological, and social justice frameworks which collectively hold that social factors, especially those that oppress individuals, groups, and communities, foster multilevel health inequity. 

• Diversity & Oppression