Dr. LeConté J. Dill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center. Dr. Dill received her B.A. degree in Sociology from Spelman College, her MPH degree in Community Health Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles, her DrPH degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Health Policy Leadership Fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. Additionally, she has worked in academic, non-profit, and public agencies across the U.S. on issues related to health policy and advocacy, health education, program evaluation, youth organising, and urban planning. Ever interdisciplinary, she has also studied poetry with Suheir Hammad, Ruth Forman, Cornelius Eady, and Roger Reeves, and has been a featured writer in the Los Angeles Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Feminist Wire. Her community-engaged research and teaching interests are focused on addressing health and social inequities among adolescents in urban neighbourhoods. As a qualitative researcher, Dr. Dill examines the relationship between adolescent development and processes of the built and social environment, such as migration, residential segregation, gentrification, foreclosures, and neighbourhood and sexual violence. Her current work investigates how youth in distressed neighbourhoods navigate through them safely.

For additional information see LeConte’s blog or her profile for the Institute for Alternative Futures.