Author Profile
Tiffany N. Ford, Ph.D., MPH
Biography
Tiffany N. Ford is a mixed methods public policy and public health researcher and advocate. She conducts intersectionality-based policy analysis to explore racial and race-gender structural inequality in social, economic, and health arenas. She earned her Ph.D. with a concentration in social policy from the University of Maryland College Park School of Public Policy in May 2021. There, her dissertation research explored the Black women’s subjective well-being paradox and explored policy interventions to support Black women’s well-being in the U.S. Tiffany also works as a research analyst in the Future of the Middle Class Initiative at the Brookings Institution, where her work focuses on American middle-class well-being and upward mobility.
Tiffany attended the University of Miami (#theU) as an undergrad, where she majored in human and social development and economics. She earned her Master of Public Health with a concentration in community health sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, Tiffany worked as a senior policy analyst for health reform and health equity at a social justice-oriented policy research think tank in Chicago. There, her health equity research and advocacy bridged the gap between protest movements, the social and structural determinants of health, and policy interventions at institutional, systems, local, and state levels.
Tiffany’s broad view of health informs her diverse array of work, which has covered topics such as: subjective well-being (life satisfaction, optimism, and stress); overpolicing and its effects on the health workforce; defunding the police and investing in public education; racial equity in mobility; and gentrification and displacement.
Author's Essays
African Americans face a dual pandemic: anti-Black racism and COVID-19. One is hundreds of years in the making — and the other began a year and a half ago.
Racism has always existed in the United States in one form or another. Of all the ethnic groups that have come to the United…
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disparate impact on Americans across racial and ethnic divides, not only creating a health crisis but also an economic crisis and worsening racial wealth and income gaps. Fintech companies — companies that use innovations in the finance and technology spaces to…
Katrina, a 47-year-old Black woman participating in a December 2019 focus group of Black middle-class women in Wichita, summed up her feelings about the violence and inequality that Black people face in the U.S. rather succinctly, “Just the general state of the world; it's just very depressing…