Anissa I. Vines, MS, PhD

About

Dr. Anissa I. Vines's commitment to health equity is evident across her research, teaching, and public health practice. She has extensive experience in developing and leading initiatives to reduce and eliminate health disparities and conducting both community-engaged and epidemiological research. Dr. Vines is an associate professor and a member of the social epidemiology program in the Department of Epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has a secondary appointment in Academic Affairs in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Social Medicine in the UNC School of Medicine. Dr.Vines leads the Health Equity, Social Justice, and Human Rights concentration for the Gillings MPH program and serves as course coordinator for the school-wide SPHG-600 graduate course – Introduction to Public Health. Dr. Vines has been a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center for 18 years, and also serves as a member in the UNC Women’s Health Research Center, and an associate faculty member at the UNC Center for Health Equity Research. 

Anissa Vines in the Gillings News

Teaching Interests

Dr. Vines serves as course coordinator for the school-wide SPHG 600 – Introduction to Public Health course. She also guest lectures in epidemiology courses (EPID 851, EPID 826) and in other courses on health equity, women’s health, and community-engagement.

Research Activities

Dr. Vines’s research centers on achieving health equity with a particular focus on the Black/African American community. She examines psychosocial determinants of health and their influence on outcomes uterine fibroids, cancer disparities, and cardiometabolic conditions. Dr. Vines is particularly interested in multiple forms of stress across the life course, including interpersonal racism. She has developed a multi-dimensional tool to assess stress and coping in response to racism. Her research is informed by life course theory, critical race theory public health praxis, the stress and coping framework, intersectionality, and the biopsychosocial model. She is currently leading innovative research to elucidate the disproportionate burden of uterine fibroids on Black women that may be due, in part, to the stress and coping context rooted in racism. 

Dr. Vines’s community-engaged scholarship spans to the implementation of community-academic research centers, the facilitation of community-academic research partnerships, community research capacity building, the conduct of clinic-based and community-based research projects, educational outreach, and the training of peer supports (aka lay health advisors, community health workers, etc.). Currently, Dr. Vines serves as a multiple-PI of the NC Community-Engaged Alliance (CEAL) research team, funded by the NIH to prevent and reduce COVID-19. She is also the Co-director of the NCI funded Outreach Core for the UNC Lineberger and North Carolina Central University Cancer Health Disparities Partnership that is using e-Health tools and community health workers to reduce the awareness and knowledge gaps. In addition, Dr. Vines leads the Inclusive Science Program within the UNC TraCS Institute where she provides research consultations and works with colleagues at RTI on the use of a digital platform (Semblie) as a tool to increase diversity among study participants.

Key Publications

Life Course Racism and Depressive Symptoms among Young Black Women. Arbor J L Quist, Xiaoxia Han, Donna D Baird, Lauren A Wise · Ganesa Wegienka, Cheryl L Woods-Giscombe, Anissa Irvin Vines (2022). J Urban Health, 99(1), 55-66.

Development and reliability of a Telephone-Administered Perceived Racism Scale (TPRS): A tool for epidemiological use. Donna Baird, Michael Bohlig, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Maya McNeilly, June Stevens, Anissa Vines (2001). Ethnicity and Disease, 11(2), 251-262.

Associations of abdominal fat with perceived racism and passive emotional responses to racism in African American women. Donna Baird, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Kathleen Light, Maya McNeilly, June Stevens, Anissa Vines (2007). American Journal of Public Health, 97(3), 526-530.

Connecting community with campus to address cancer health disparities: a community grants program model. Paul Godley, Michelle Manning, Crystal Meyer, Randall Teal, Anissa Vines (2011). Progress in community health partnerships : research, education, and action, 5(2), 207-212.

The association between self-reported major life events and the presence of uterine fibroids. Denise Esserman, Myduc Ta, Anissa Vines (2010). Women's Health Issues, 20(4), 294-298.

Self-reported daily stress, squelching of anger and the management of daily stress and the prevalence of uterine leiomyomata: The ultrasound screening study. Donna Baird, Denise Esserman, Thu Nguyen, Myduc Ta, Anissa Vines (2011). Stress and Health, 27(3), e188-e194.

Education