Dustin Duncan, ScD

Dustin T. Duncan, ScD is Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Duncan is a fierce advocate for the role of research, science and higher education in addressing complex global challenges, and addressing structural inequity within and outside of the digital academy. Dr. Duncan is an internationally renowned Social and Spatial Epidemiologist. 

Dr. Duncan is a sought-after global thought leader and innovative researcher. Their pioneering research broadly seeks to understand how social contextual factors especially neighborhood characteristics influence population health and health equity. Dr. Duncan’s intersectional research focuses on sexual minority men and transgender people of color across the African diaspora, predominantly situated in the United States and East Africa. Dr. Duncan is learning to speak, read and write Swahili. 

Dr. Duncan has made seminal contributions to the fields of public health, epidemiology and health equity. Dr. Duncan’s scholarly work appears in leading public health, epidemiology, medical, geography, criminology, demography, and psychology journals. Working in collaborations with scholars across the world, Dr. Duncan has over 250 high-impact articles (>125 first or senior-authored), book chapters and books cited approximately 10,000 times; Dr. Duncan’s research has appeared in major media outlets including CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Dr. Duncan’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the HIV Prevention Trials Network, the Tow Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Health & Place, the Journal of Urban Health, and Transgender Health.

A career-long educator, Dr. Duncan’s commitment to outstanding teaching was solidified through being an Instructor for courses at NYU Abu Dhabi and the Columbia University, and lecturing at various institutions by invitation. Dr. Duncan is an award-winning leader who have received scientific contribution, mentoring and leadership awards, including from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS). In 2020, Dr. Duncan proudly received the Mentor of the Year Award from Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

At Columbia, Dr. Duncan also directs Columbia’s Spatial Epidemiology Lab, co-directs the epidemiology department’s Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit, and co-directs the Health Equity Core in the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. In addition, Dr. Duncan sits on the boards of the Council for Black Health, Ronald McDonald House New York, and an eponymous foundation in Harlem, New York, led by their mother Dr. Dionne J. Jones.

Dr. Duncan is currently completing a Certificate in HIV/AIDS and Counseling at the Kenya Institute of Social Work, while they expand their funding and impact in the East Africa region with various Columbia colleagues. As Dr. Duncan’s lab works on health equity issues in East Africa, they are deepening the Columbia Spatial Epidemiology Lab—as the group has become a leading geospatial resource for research groups focused on GIS mapping and spatial analyses among sexual and gender minorities in the United States.