Samantha Gailey, PhD

Samantha Gailey is 1855 Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Equity in the Department of Forestry and C.S. Mott Department of Public Health. She joined the faculty at MSU after completing a T32 Population Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota (2023) and a PhD in Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine (2021). Her research, teaching, and outreach are informed by a commitment to environmental justice and an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theories and methods from epidemiology, psychology, and geography.

Dr. Gailey’s research focuses on understanding how inequities in access to neighborhood resources contribute to, and perpetuate, health disparities—and how these place-based inequities can be redressed. Much of her work seeks to understand whether expanding access to green space, in particular, can serve as a tool to advance health equity, especially when combined with access to affordable housing, healthy food, and other, more fundamental resources. She focuses her research on mothers, infants, and children: populations highly susceptible to the salutary and deleterious effects of neighborhoods.

Dr. Gailey’s methodological approach to examining neighborhood effects emphasizes causality, leveraging natural experiments and longitudinal cohorts (over observational and cross-sectional designs) to investigate whether exogenous changes—like the creation of a new green space or a novel housing policy—influence local and population health. She combines this causal approach with the use of large secondary datasets (e.g., state-level birth cohort files) and innovative primary data collection techniques (e.g., GPS tracking, ecological momentary assessments, cortisol sampling) to understand both the overarching population health effects of place-based initiatives, and the underlying biopsychosocial mechanisms that reflect daily lived experiences.

Dr. Gailey is starting a new research group at MSU—the GREEN (Growing Environmental Equity in Neighborhoods) Lab—and developing an interdisciplinary graduate program on natural environments and human health. Interested students can learn more or get involved by emailing her at sgailey@msu.edu.

 

Research Interests

• Perinatal epidemiology
• Environmental justice
• Nature and health
• Neighborhood effects
• Causal inference

 

Informational Links

• PubMed
• Google Scholar 
• CANR webpage