A more formal, awkward third-person bio that I wrote, but pretend a magical narrator conjured after looking at my bookshelf, a PubMed search, and reading my last five emails, social media posts, and text messages.

Dr. Ryan J. Petteway is a public health professor/scholar and educator who integrates social epidemiology, participatory research, and creative arts to advance health equity. He engages critical, Black feminist, and decolonizing theory and methods to pursue procedural and epistemic justice within public health research/practice, including via music and poetry.

His applied research integrates social epidemiology and CBPR/YPAR to examine place, “placemaking,” and health, making use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to democratize and enhance research/practice processes. He takes an intergenerational approach to his research, anchors his scholarship in the principles of CBPR/YPAR, and employs exclusively participatory methods—conceptual, procedural, and methodological characteristics of his work that reflect the value he places on equitable and decolonized community engagement.

A core aim of Dr. Petteway’s applied work is facilitating permanent mechanisms for including the voices of residents within local health and placemaking decisions/processes. In this spirit, he’s currently developing a STEAM-based high school curriculum/training program focused on social determinants of health (SDH), health equity, and participatory research—yHEART PDX, the youth Health Equity and Action Research Training program. Current yHEART projects examine place-based SDH and racial exclusion/inclusion in N/NE Portland.

More broadly, Dr. Petteway’s current research and scholarship engages three general areas:

1. Notions of “place”, embodiment, and “placemaking” in community health, and the social, economic, and political processes that govern the spatial distribution of health opportunities;

2. Epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production processes, e.g. data justice and considerations of power and epistemic violence/oppression;

3. Application of critical theory to examine, a) dominant discourse/narrative frames of “health equity”, and b) pervading ethical frames of public health law and police powers.

Dr. Petteway’s scholarship and creative works have been honored with multiple Society for Public Health Education paper of the year awards (2021, 2022), a data visualization prize from the American Association of Geographers (2019), a national poetry month prize (2020), a Pushcart Prize nomination (2020), and selections as finalist or short/long list for various other prizes. His research has appeared in a range of top-tier public health journals, including Social Science & Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Journal of Urban Health, and Health Education & Behavior. His poetry has appeared in both peer-reviewed public health and traditional poetry journals, including Health Promotion Practice, International Journal of Epidemiology, Critical Public Health, Kithe, Brain Mill Press, and Bellevue Literary Review.

Prior to his doctoral training, Dr. Petteway served  as social epidemiologist and chief epidemiologist at the Baltimore City Health Department. Prior to that he sat on bench-backs and sipped “orange drink”, listening to Mobb Deep while conducting observational studies of project life.