Sarah Gehlert, Ph.D. is E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the Brown School and a scholar at Washington University’s Institute for Public Health.  She joined the Brown School in 2009 from the University of Chicago, where she was the Helen Ross Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and the Institute of Mind and Biology, and the Department of Comparative Human Development.

While at Chicago, Dr. Gehlert served as the associate director of the university’s NIH-funded Institute for Translational Medicine (CTSA) and co-chaired its Community Translation Science Cluster.  She remains the Principal Investigator and Director of the university’s NIH-funded Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research, now a joint center with Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Gehlert’s publications focus on social influences on health, especially the health of vulnerable populations. She currently is working on the influence of neighborhood and community factors, such as community violence and unsafe housing, on psychosocial functioning among African-American women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, with an eye toward how these factors "get under the skin" to affect gene expression and tumorigenesis.  She has a special interest in the biology of women’s behavior.

While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Gehlert was an investigator on the NICHD-funded National Children’s Study. She also directed the university’s  Maternal and Child Health Training Program from 1992-1998 and was Principal Investigator on an NIMH-funded community-based study of rural and urban women's health and mental health from 1997-2001. She was Core Leader of the Health Disparities and Communities Core of the CDC-funded Chicago Center for Excellence in Health Promotion Economics from 2004 to 2007. She served on the Internal Advisory Committee of the University of Chicago's Cancer Research Center.

Dr. Gehlert serves on the External Advisory Committee of the University of Chicago’s Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Breast Cancer and the Chicago Breast Cancer Mortality Reduction Task Force. Her professional activities also include memberships on the Quadrennial Site Visit Committee of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Professional Advisory Board of the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Chicago, and the steering committee of the Washington Park Children's Free Clinic in Chicago. She was Chair of NIH's 2007 Summer Institute on Community-Based Participatory Research.