Dr Stephani Hatch is a Professor of Sociology and Epidemiology leading the Health Inequalities Research Group at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London. She received her PhD in Sociology from University of Maryland (2002) and was a recipient of the American Sociological Association/National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Minority Fellowship Programme in the sociology of mental health. She was then awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the NIMH Psychiatric Epidemiology Training programme at Columbia University. Dr Hatch has extensive experience delivering interdisciplinary health inequalities research and has published extensively on inequalities in mental health and health services; discrimination and other forms of social adversity; community mental health; and multimorbidity. She was the principal investigator of the social inequalities strand of the UK National Institute for Health Research and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, South East London Community Health (SELCoH) study from 2008 to 2015. In 2017, she received a Wellcome Trust Investigator’s Award to lead, Tackling Inequalities and Discrimination Experiences in Health Services (TIDES) study, a mixed methods programme of work focused on service users and health professionals that expanded in 2020 with ESRC funding to utilise a participatory framework to examine racial and ethnic inequalities in mental health and occupational outcomes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. She also currently co-leads the Marginalised Communities and Mental Health programme within the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, focused on advancing research with communities that have often been ignored, to examine and disrupt structures maintaining social inequities in mental health, with an emphasis on race within an intersectionality framework. She integrates collaborative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination, action and outreach in training and research through the Health Inequalities Research Network (HERON), which she founded in 2010.

Dr Hatch strongly aligns her research with her equity, diversity and inclusion leadership, board membership, and advisory roles at King’s College London, across public health and community sectors (e.g., with local public health authorities) and nationally, in the US with the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, and in the UK with Health Education England, National Health Service (NHS) Race and Health Observatory, and NHS England and NHS Improvement.

The faculty in the Department of Sociology at UMD provided me with comprehensive and rigorous training in the sociology of mental health, social theory, and research methods. Dr. Leonard Pearlin was a truly exceptional supervisor, and the mentorship and guidance that I received from the wider faculty and my fellow PhD students gave me the skills needed for working internationally in an interdisciplinary faculty and across sectors with non-academic partners and communities.