UNL's Minority Health Disparities Initiative is honored to welcome Dr. Ilan Meyer, Distinguished Senior Scholar for Public Policy at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law and Professor Emeritus of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Meyer will be discussing his research on minority health disparities, LGBT health, and sexual orientation law on March 13th at 2:00 pm in Nebraska Union room Regency A.
Dr. Meyer's areas of research include stress and illness in minority populations, in particular, the relationship of minority status, minority identity, prejudice and discrimination and mental health outcomes in sexual minorities and the intersection of minority stressors related to sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and gender. In several highly cited papers, Dr. Meyer has developed a model of minority stress that describes the relationship of social stressors and mental disorders and helps to explain LGBT health disparities. The model has guided his and other investigators’ population research on LGBT health disparities by identifying the mechanisms by which social stressors impact health and describing the harm to LGBT people from prejudice and stigma. For this work, Dr. Meyer received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns of the American Psychological Association (APA) and Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the APA’s Division 44. Based on this body of work, Dr. Meyer has provided expert testimony in Perry v. Brown (later Hollingsworth v. Perry), a major civil rights case related to the right of gay men and lesbians to marry in the United States; testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in their briefing on peer-to-peer violence and bullying; and statements to the European Court of Human Rights in Bayev v. Russia, a case challenging the Russian law banning “homosexual propaganda.”
Dr. Meyer is Principal Investigator of two important studies: the Generations Study, a study of stress, identity, health, and health care utilization across three cohorts of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in the United States (NICHD grant 1R01HD078526); and the TransPop study, the first national probability sample of transgender individuals in the U.S. (NICHD grant 1R01HD078526). The study results will provide a more accurate and detailed picture of the issues faced by transgender people than has been available to researchers and policymakers to date.
More details at: https://go.unl.edu/vq6f