Dr. Rebekah Walker is health services researcher, an Associate Professor of Medicine and Division Chief for the Division of Population Health in the Department of Medicine, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. She completed her Bachelors work at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, her Master’s at Nova Southeastern University, and her Ph.D. in Health and Rehabilitation Science at the Medical University of South Carolina. Her PhD focused on health services research with training in health behavior, health economics, and advanced regression techniques, including path analysis and structural equation modeling. She then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina focused on health disparities, and gained exposure to multidisciplinary research incorporating public health, implementation science and community-based research principles.

Her research aims to reduce and eliminate health disparities by addressing social and structural determinants of health, with particular emphasis on addressing the influence of food insecurity on adults with chronic disease. Her contributions to science have focused on: 1) developing and testing community-based interventions that incorporate social determinants of health to improve health outcomes for adults with chronic disease, 2) identifying and implementing community and policy level interventions that address structural factors impacting health at a population level, and 3) addressing the needs of underserved populations in low and middle-income countries through increasing capacity for and engaging communities in research.

She has authored over 180 peer-reviewed publications investigating mechanisms and pathways for behavioral, psychosocial, and community level social determinants of health, and has served on study sections for the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and National Institute of Health (NIH). She is currently funded as a Multiple PI through the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to test community-based strategies to address food insecurity. She is also funded as a co-investigator through the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to identify structural racism pathways via social risks and identify policy interventions to improve diabetes outcomes. Finally, she serves as a mentor on four career development awards focused on developing and testing interventions that incorporate social determinants of health to change health outcomes for adults with chronic disease.