Emily Wang, M.D.

Overview

In 2023, the United States entered its sixth decade of mass incarceration—a period of legal and policy decisions that led to massive expansion of incarceration as punishment and restrictions on public social services and civic life following incarceration. Its disproportionate effect on Black communities and its links to histories of racial violence and control place mass incarceration as a key feature of structural racism. Tens of millions of adults, especially poor and racialized minority individuals, have been incarcerated, with more than 70 million having a criminal record.

The impacts of mass incarceration and the stigma of a criminal record have lasting health effects to both those who experience it and their families. Yet incarceration is rarely addressed in clinical care or included as a focus of health equity efforts.

In this talk, Dr. Wang presented work that illuminates the current state of knowledge on the health harms of mass incarceration. She discussed novel approaches, drawn from her and others’ work, to studying, preventing, and mitigating the health harms of mass incarceration, and especially the importance of engaging those directly impacted in solutions-oriented research. Attendees left with clarity on what we know, what we don’t know, and where we need to go.

Biography

Emily Wang is a professor in the Yale School of Medicine and directs the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, a collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School.

The Center is committed to ending mass incarceration by working across the disparate domains of health, law, and criminal justice through direct clinical care, conducting research, educating health students and professionals, and driving legal advocacy and scholarship. Dr. Wang leads the Center’s research program, which receives National Institutes of Health funding to investigate how incarceration influences chronic health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and opioid use disorder, and uses a participatory approach to study structural interventions which mitigate the impacts of incarceration.

As an internist, she has cared for thousands of individuals with a history of incarceration and is co-founder of the Transitions Clinic Network, a national consortium of community health centers dedicated to caring for individuals released from correctional facilities by employing community health workers with histories of incarceration.

Dr. Wang serves on the Board of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She was inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation (2021) and the National Academies of Medicine (2023) and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2022). Dr. Wang has an A.B. from Harvard University, an M.D. from Duke University, and a M.A.S. from the University of California, San Francisco.