Jeni Hebert-Beirne
Awardee (2023)
Associate Professor, Community Health Sciences, Division of School of Public Health
About
Jeni Hebert-Beirne is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health (SPH). Jeni is a community-based participatory researcher (CBPR) who uses qualitative, community-engaged research approaches to promote health equity at the neighborhood level focusing on understanding the lived experience of those most impacted by structural drivers of health inequities and identifying community-led and/or system-level solution. Jeni co-founded the UIC SPH Collaboratory for Health Justice CHJ, which seeks to enhance reciprocal engagement between UIC SPH and community partners, and UIC Partnerships for Antiracist Campus Transformation, a cross campus initiative to invest in authentic community engagement. Through her Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) funded research, she is invested in sustaining long-term academic-community partnerships to advance health equity research. Her longest academic-community collaboration, in its 13th year, is the NIOSH funded R01 Greater Lawndale Healthy Work project a CBPR project in the Center for Healthy Work to build power, build capacity and building equity to promote healthy work at the neighborhood level in two neighborhoods on Chicago’s west side. One of our evidenced based community interventions to promote healthy work, The Greater Lawndale Loteria, has been selected to be exhibited at the CDC Foundation Museum. She is the Community Engagement Core Principal Investigator (PI) for the Chicago Center for Health and the Environment (CACHET). She is also a faculty member and former co-chair of Radical Public Health, a student-driven movement at UIC to address root causes of health injustices, resulting in among other things, the establishment of a course at UIC SPH Epidemics of Injustice which is open to community partners and seeks to prepares public health leaders and community members with the tools to bring about social change and address structural determinants of health. She routinely partners with public health practice leaders to advance neighborhood health equity. She is the inaugural SPH Associate Dean for Community Engagement. She received the 2022 Association for Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) Excellence in Public Health Practice award. She and her long-time community research partner Dolores Castañeda received the 2021 Delta Omega Honor Society Innovative Curriculum Award.