Assistant Professor, Population and Public Health Sciences and Spatial Sciences, University of Southern California.
Dr. Hoda Abdel Magid is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences with the USC Keck School of Medicine and of Spatial Sciences with the USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute.
Her research focuses on understanding how place affects health. She examines how social determinants of health (such as income or employment) affect chronic disease behaviors and chronic disease outcomes. Dr. Abdel Magid also is interested in the disproportionate risk to socially and racially marginalized communities that is largely due to the contextual health influences of the physical and social environment.
She is currently working to develop a specific epidemiologic framework for utilizing electronic health records, survey and geographic data with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial methods to reduce health disparities among socially marginalized populations.
Her goal is to merge clinical data with data on social determinants of health in a spatial epidemiology framework to effectively allow us to ask and answer questions about how place affects health. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Abdel Magid was at Stanford University, where she was an instructor and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health.
Longevity and Healthy Aging Project: Impact of spatial social polarization indices on hypertension in older Black Americans.
This pilot project addresses the alarming disparity in vascular aging among Black and White older adults, particularly in early-onset hypertension. by examining the impact of spatial social polarization (SSP) indices, which gauge population distribution in terms of privilege and deprivation, Dr. Abdel Magid will estimate the population-level impact of eliminating differences in socioeconomic SSP on early onset hypertension and age at death among Black and White older adults. She will then develop a structural SSP index using measures of structural resources and estimate the association between structural SSP and early-onset hypertension in Black and White adults. Using hypertension as a proof of concept, this research will increase our understanding of whether socioeconomic and structural SSP domains can be used to better understand social determinants of aging, which would allow us to develop more effective interventions to improve the health and well-being of diverse older adults (Goals B and F of the NIA Strategic Plan).
