Paula Braveman

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Paula A. Braveman is an American physician and researcher who studies health equity—the idea that everyone should have a fair chance to be healthy—and the social factors that shape health, such as income, education, and racism. She helped create a global health equity initiative at the World Health Organization and is a Professor Emeritus of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 2002 she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (then called the Institute of Medicine).

Braveman grew up in Boston and Miami in modest, working-class neighborhoods. Her father sold newspaper advertising, and she has an older brother. She earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1970. After college, she hitchhiked across the United States and Canada; when money ran out, she worked through a temp agency and ended up at a clinic serving at-risk youth.

She earned her medical degree from UCSF in 1979 and then completed a Master of Public Health in epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. Braveman worked as a clinical physician in San Francisco hospitals and health centers. In the 1980s she supported public health projects in Central America with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organization. In the 1990s she collaborated with the World Health Organization to improve health in low- and middle-income countries.

At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation she led work that helped define health equity and emphasized education as a key social determinant of health. She says a strong motivation for her research is a desire to improve social justice. Her work has examined how racism contributes to health disparities among women and their children. An early influential study from 1989 showed that newborns of mothers without insured prenatal care faced higher health risks, and a 2011 paper helped further define “health equity.” Her 2022 Health Affairs article was among the journal’s most-read.

Braveman has served on the Advisory Council of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and on committees for other federal agencies. In 2011 she spoke to the U.S. Senate about poverty and health.