The Social Side of Health: How reducing inequality can improve health outcomes for Americans

In 1961, twenty-year-old Peter Sterling left Cornell University to join the Freedom Rides in Jackson, Mississippi where he was arrested and jailed. That experience shaped his eventual career as a neuroscientist and for the next 20+ years, Sterling split his time between the microscope and the streets of poor communities. What he found is an alarming correlation between social tension and hypertension that challenges the traditional way America views health.

A lifelong political activist and prominent neuroscientist, Sterling believes that society has narrowed the opportunities for Americans to exercise our innate gifts — especially those who are in poor and marginalized communities — and that this mismatch has only increased “deaths of despair.” Join us as we welcome Dr. Sterling to the University of Notre Dame to share his view of what health is: equality, education, community, and the belief that your life actually matters.

This event is co-sponsored by the Pulte Institute for Global Development and the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, both integral parts of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and is open to the public.

Speakers:
Peter Sterling
Professor of Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

For more information visit the event website.