Core Faculty
Giselle Corbie, M.D., M.Sc.
Director
Giselle Corbie, M.D., M.Sc. is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Social Medicine and Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and is Director of the Center for Health Equity Research. She is also the Director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute’s Community Academic Resources for Engaged Scholarships (CARES) services, and Co-Director of the Program on Health Disparities through the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
Corbie is nationally recognized for her scholarly work and has expertise in community-engaged and patient-oriented research. Her empirical work, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, has focused on the methodological, ethical, and practical issues of research to address racial disparities in health. She has been the principal investigator of grants funded through the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD), and the National Human Genome Research Institute. Since 2004, Corbie has been the PI on grants to support Project GRACE, a community-academic research partnership in Eastern North Carolina that has developed, tested and disseminated interventions to prevent HIV and cardiovascular disease.
Gaurav Dave, M.D., DrPH, MPH
Director, Abacus
Gaurav Dave is a Research Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Associate Director of the Center for Health Equity Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Dave is an expert in the field of formative and summative evaluation research, specializing in evaluating multi-level, complex initiatives, programs and interventions. He has over 15 years of clinical and public health practice and evaluation experience. His area of research focuses primarily on hypertension and chronic diseases, integrating systems thinking in evaluation research. He is the Director of Evaluation of the NIH-funded North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (TraCS) at UNC, which aims at to accelerate clinical and translational research from health science to discovery to dissemination to patients and communities. Dave co-directs the Systems Science and Evaluation Lab at UNC to foster the integration systems thinking and evaluation in biomedical, clinical and public health research. He serves as the Evaluation chair for HRSA’s Southeast Regional Genetics Network at Emory University to improve health equity and health outcomes in individuals with genetic conditions, reduce morbidity and mortality caused by genetic conditions.
As the principal evaluator and investigator, Dave has worked on various federally and foundation-funded projects all over the U.S., including the Newborn Screening and Sickle Cell Disease Program, Heart Matters and Community Initiative to Eliminate Stroke. Dave has a medical degree from the University of Pune, India and worked as an emergency room physician in Mumbai, before coming to the U.S. in 2004. He attended UNC Greensboro and completed a Masters and a Doctorate in Public Health in 2006 and 2011 respectively, with a concentration in public health, community-based prevention research and evaluation. Dave’s research interests include evaluation, systems science, and methods research to reduce disparities associated with chronic diseases and hypertension.
Leah Frerichs, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Leah Frerichs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Associate Director of the Center for Health Equity Research at UNC. Frerichs is an expert in research focused on the intersection of community-based participatory research and systems science to address health inequities. Her work has spanned practice and research with an overarching goal to develop, implement and evaluate programs and policies that are grounded in community needs and values.
She has worked with a diverse range of communities on a multitude of topics including adolescent health, cancer screening, cardiovascular disease prevention, substance abuse and mental health. As a principal investigator, Frerichs has led grants funded through Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tasseli McKay, Ph.D.
Core Faculty
Tasseli McKay is Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill and core faculty in the Center for Health Equity Research. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and a social scientist in the Transformative Research Unit for Equity at RTI International.
McKay serves as principal investigator on the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-funded project, “Institutional Contact and Family Violence in an Era of Mass Incarceration.” She also worked for almost a decade on the Multi-site Family Study of Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering, a mixed-method longitudinal study of two thousand families affected by incarceration. This culminated in her first book: Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019) with Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir. McKay’s most recent book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022), finds that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs to Black communities, many of which have been kept out of sight by women’s labor.