Amanda Calhoun, MD, MPH, a resident in the Albert J. Solnit Integrated Adult/Child Psychiatry program, has been accepted to the American Medical Association (AMA)-Satcher Health Leadership Institute (SHLI) Medical Justice in Advocacy Fellowship.
The one-year fellowship begins in September 2022.
Launched in 2021, the fellowship is designed to enhance physicians’ advocacy leadership skills to improve health outcomes and advance health equity in the areas they serve or may serve.
Using an anti-racist, equity-centered learning framework, it provides a mentoring and training platform that will equip participants with the foundational skills, tools, and knowledge to engage in institutional and political health advocacy. This will involve exploring several critical topic areas, including:
- Upstream (action-based) models of advocacy that address social and structural drivers of health
- Structural, cultural, political, and historical analysis of the production of inequities
- Sector and resource engagement required to improve community health and well-being
Calhoun participated in the Yale Op-Ed Project Fellowship and has written numerous opinion pieces in the general press, including STAT, Huff Post, and The Progressive Magazine. Her academic manuscripts have appeared in publications like the New England Journal of Medicine. Her research interests focus on the improvement of mental health outcomes in Black American children as well as global mental health.