Megan Threats
Assistant Professor, Health Management & Policy
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Megan Threats is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is the Director of the Health Justice Informatics Lab.
She is also a Visting Faculty at the Yale School of Public Health, an affiliate at the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan Gerld R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at New York University, the Black Health Informatics Working Group at Brown University, and the Digital Studies Institute.
She studies health information practices and multilevel determinants of information and health inequities impacting marginalized communities. She uses an approach she calls 'health justice informatics' to work with communities to collaboratively develop and implement informatics interventions and consumer health information and technologies to address the effects of intersecting, multilevel forms of discrimination, including, but not limited to, racism and sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Her research aims to reduce health disparities and improve health outcomes among marginalized communities by using her findings to inform information, public health, and health IT policies and translate her findings into developing programs and practices within learning and health institutions.
In May 2020, Dr. Threats completed a PhD in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science where she was a Gates Millennium Scholar, P.E.O. Scholar, and a Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She received a Master of Library and Information Science from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and a completed a dual Bachelor of Arts in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy and Comparative Cultures and Politics at the Michigan State University James Madison College where she was a McNair Scholar.
Dr. Threats has extensive experience working in libraries, public health, public policy, higher education administration and in the technology sector. Mostly notably, she worked as the Public Services and Reference Librarian at the AIDS Library of Philadelphia FIGHT; where she was an American Library Association Emerging Leader. As an intern for former U.S. Senator Carl Levin and as the Director of Educational Policy for the Associated Students of Michigan State University, she gained invaluable advocacy and policy research/writing experience. In her previous professional roles with the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program, Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, and the i3 Scholars Program, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM and health related fields.
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