Assistant Professor, Department of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences
“Atlanta is a place where there is a rich history of collective community action and response to some of the toughest and most devastating health and social circumstances—including to reproductive health, human rights, civil rights, and more. I think it’s a great place for students to understand how best we can navigate these types of circumstances and make an impact.”
As director of Emory’s Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast (RISE), reproductive health and health equity are at the heart of everything Whitney Rice does. It was the school’s strength in this area that initially attracted Rice to join the school as an MPH student, and, in 2018, as a member of the faculty.
“It was a huge motivator for my return,” she says. “I was excited to enter a professional community of folks with connected and overlapping research interests. I see Rollins as a driving force for sexual reproductive and maternal health research and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
Rice’s research interests include topics that are politically divisive and emotionally charged. She studies the impact of restrictive abortion policies on women’s health, maternal mortality, and the impact of racial disparities on maternal outcomes. Despite the heaviness to Rice’s work, there’s an openness to her and a warmth that make her a popular collaborator and professor.
Rice regularly inspires her own students in Research Methods in Health Promotion, where she brings real-world research scenarios into the classroom.
“What I enjoy about that course, and teaching more broadly, is I really get to bring into the classroom what I see in practice. I get to show students the reality of the research process with all of its difficulties and excitement.”
Many students go on to get a more personal look of what it’s like to work on Rice’s team by doing just that. RISE regularly posts positions for graduate research assistants to serve as integral contributors to the team’s work—including on several of Rice’s projects.
One of her current studies, OVAL, is part of CORAL, a maternal health center of excellence housed at Morehouse that is a collaboration with Rollins and Emory School of Medicine. That center is focused on maternal behavioral health with a justice-oriented lens. Rice is co-principal investigator of a project that focuses on overdoses and pregnancy and is seeking out ways to mitigate some of the structural barriers that people at the intersection of substance use and pregnancy have had.
Despite the current restrictive policy environment in Georgia, Rice sees Atlanta as a place that is full of possibility, especially in terms of collaborators working in the reproductive health space (as the CORAL project epitomizes).
“Atlanta is a place where there is a rich history of collective community action and response to some of the toughest and most devastating [health and social] circumstances—including to reproductive health, human rights, civil rights, and more,” says Rice. “I have personally learned so much about how folks can continue to see the health and wellbeing they desire despite some of those restrictive policy circumstances. I think it’s a great place for students to understand how best we can navigate these types of circumstances and make an impact.”