The Arnold School’s Department of Health Services Policy and Management and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control will host the 13^th annual James E. Clyburn Health Equity Lecture, which is free and open to the public, on Monday, April 6 at 10 a.m. at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center (1101 Lincoln Street  Columbia, S.C.).  The theme of this year's lecture is "Taking Action to Advance Health Equity: Addressing Poverty and the Social Determinants of Health." 

Speaker Bio

Joseph Telfair, DRPH, MSW, MPH, received both his Masters in Social Work and Public Health from the University of California at Berkeley and Doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. He is currently Associate Dean of Public Health
Practice and Research in Georgia Southern University’s Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health. He is a 27-year member of the American Public Health Association and has served in numerous leadership roles within his section (MCH) and the Association (Governing Council, Executive Board), as well as a supporter of his caucus (CBPH), forum (Genetics) and his past (North Carolina) and current (Georgia) Affiliates. He is the Immediate Past-President of the Association. 

Telfair brings nearly 30 years of experience working with the populations in primary care and public health settings directly as a clinician, researcher, evaluator, project director and advocate; he has been a public health faculty member and leader in three schools of public health for 23 years; been a faculty member, co-director or director of a number of HRSA, NIH and CDC funded training programs (as an MCH and Community Public health faculty, environmental health) and research and coordinating Centers. He has served and serves on numerous local, state, national and international expert medical, health and public health research and evaluation, advisory committees and workgroups/taskforces (as both member and leader) for numerous agencies including states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Alabama departments of public health, NIH, HRSA, DHHS (OPA, AHRQ), and CDC. He has developed materials for and taught courses designed to build, enhance the knowledge and skills of community, medical and public health workers in maternal and child health, research and evaluation design and methods, issues of access to, and utilization of, health care. He has extensive experience training, working with and assessing performance of providers at all level in USA and developing countries experiencing high levels of social, economic and health disparities including Africa, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

He has devoted his career to and is internationally known for his research, teaching, and practice in the areas of cultural and linguistic competency, public health genetics, elimination of health inequities, community-based and rural health practice, and program evaluation. 

 

Call for Abstracts

In conjunction with the Clyburn Lecture, a poster session has also been planned. Students, faculty, staff and members of other academic institutions or community organizations are invited to submit abstracts by Friday, March 6 for consideration for the session. Abstracts should be 300 words or less and describe health equity research or practice, particularly in the areas of the science of health disparities, social justice and special populations. The poster session will include a limited number of selected abstracts and will be held during the reception immediately following the lecture. Learn more about the call for abstracts. 

For more information, please contact the poster session organizers:

- Dr. Bankole Olatosi, olatosi@mailbox.sc.edu
- Dr. Nicole Hair, HAIRNL@mailbox.sc.edu
- Dr. M. Mahmud Khan, mkhan@mailbox.sc.edu
- Dr. Toni Torres-McGehee, TORRESMC@mailbox.sc.edu

About the Lecture

Congressman James E. Clyburn, along with Senator Ernest F. Hollings, was instrumental in securing funding to establish the Institute for Partnerships to Eliminate Health Disparities in 2003. The Institute created a Lecture to honor Congressman Clyburn. The Lecture was established as a mechanism to allow national and regional health disparities researchers, public health researchers, practice professionals, policy makers and community leaders to share their findings, best practices, and lessons learned with students, faculty, and the community, in order to facilitate research and community engagement efforts focused on reducing and eliminating health disparities. Since its inception, the Lecture has been well attended by local government officials, the university’s faculty, staff and students and the community. In 2020, it was renamed the James E. Clyburn Health Equity Lecture.