Dr. Powell will discuss how the combined impact of COVID-19 and racism is brewing a lethal force of mental health syndemics — or the social patterning of co-occurring disease conditions. COVID-19 has all the ingredients of a trauma pandemic in the making.

Dr. Powell was recently named one of the 25 Essential Black Voices on Mental Health and Wellness. Wizdom is Director of the Health Disparities Institute and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at The University of Connecticut.

Formerly, Dr. Powell spent over a decade at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health where she held a tenured appointment in the Department of Health Behavior and was Research Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Health Equity Research in the Department of Social Medicine.