Catherine Cubbin, Ph.D.

Catherine Cubbin, Ph.D., is a courtesy professor in the Department of Population Health and a professor and associate dean for research in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin.

She received her doctorate in health and social policy with a minor in history of public health from Johns Hopkins University. She was trained as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predoctoral fellow at the National Center for Health Statistics and as an National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

Cubbin’s research focuses on using epidemiology methods to better understand social inequalities in health for the purpose of informing policy. From 2001 to 2006, she was an NIH Health Disparities Scholar, and since 1997, she has been a coordinating committee member of the Spirit of 1848, a caucus of the American Public Health Association that focuses on the intersection between public health and social justice. She is the principal investigator of an NIH training grant to increase diversity among scholars of health equity in heart and lung diseases. She is also an associate editor for Health & Place and a deputy editor for Demography.

In 2019, she was named in the 100 most influential contemporary social work faculty in the U.S. and was awarded the Diana DiNitto Peer Faculty Mentor Award from the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy for Social Work and Social Welfare.