Dr. Avery Everhart came to the Population, Health & Place program from American Studies & Ethnicity at USC where she began her PhD journey. Prior to USC she earned an MA in Gender Studies from Queen's University, and BAs in French, Women's & Gender Studies, and Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
While in PHP, her dissertation focused on access to transgender-specific medical care in the United States and had three aims: the creation of a national, spatially-enabled database of healthcare facilities that provide transgender medical care, the calculation of spatially explicit estimates of the size of transgender populations across the country, and the development of a quantitative method for measuring access to healthcare through a human rights framework with transgender-specific medicine as the case study. She concluded that the dearth of viable data and the insufficient methods for dealing with small populations on large geographic scales paints an incomplete portrait of transgender life. However, Everhart also suggests that this incomplete portrait necessitates methodological innovation that can lead to greater insight on not only trans communities, but other marginalized communities as well. Dr. John P. Wilson and Dr. Laura Ferguson were her co-chairs, and Dr. Juan De Lara, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and Dr. Arjee Restar were her remaining committee members.
Beyond her dissertation work, she has published across disciplines on transgender and gender diverse communities including in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Social Science & Medicine, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Annals of Epidemiology, Transgender Health, Open Global Rights and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.
While finishing her doctorate, she co-founded an independent, non-profit academic think tank, the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, with her colleagues Dr. TJ Billard and Eri Zhang of Northwestern University. They have junior, senior and distinguished fellows working across the humanities and the social, biomedical, and life sciences based in six countries around the world. The Center also launched a platinum, open-access journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies in June of 2022 with an inaugural double issue.
In Fall 2022 she joins the School of Information and the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health as a jointly-appointed Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. There she will be working in collaboration with her mentors Dr. Oliver Haimson (Information) and Dr. Kristi Gamarel (Health Behavior & Health Education) at the intersections of technology, trans health and geographic information science.
Dr. Everhart will be leading a community-based participatory research project with Haimson and Gamarel in collaboration with the Trans Sistas of Color Project in Detroit, Michigan, investigating the role of neighborhood level exposures and long term minority stress in chronic disease outcomes among trans women of color living in the region.
More information about Avery can be found on her personal website averyeverhart.com and you can find her on Twitter as well @avery_everhart.
