Dr. Meredith Minkler is Professor in the Graduate Group, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. She was founding director of the UC Berkeley Center on Aging, and has close to 40 years’ experience teaching, conducting research, and partnering with underserved communities to address health inequities through community building, organizing, and community- engaged research. Her current research includes community and policy interventions to address food insecurity, youth disempowerment and criminal justice reform. Dr. Minkler also is working with African colleagues on community engagement strategies to improve the prevention and control of the next Ebola or related emerging infectious disease. She is a leading authority on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and community engagement theories and strategies for health, healthcare, and research. She co-authored the first major U.S. study on Community Based Participatory Research in the health field (2003); was the lead author on a pioneering paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (Aug. 2006) demonstrating social gradient in disability in the U.S., even at very high social class levels; and co-authored the first in-depth book documenting the health and life circumstances of grandparents raising grandchildren (1993).

She has published widely in the academic literature, and is the author, editor, or co-editor of seminal volumes on CPBPR and community engagement, including Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare (3^rd edition, 2012), and (with Nina Wallerstein),Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: From Process to Outcomes (2^nd edition, 2008). She has received a Kellogg National Fellowship; the Distinguished Mentorship Award from the Gerontological Society of America; a Distinguished Career Award, PHPHE section, APHA; and a Distinguished Fellow Award from the Society for Public Health Education.