Title: Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Drexel University
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Title: Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Drexel University
Education: Ph.D., Population Health Sciences; MPH, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Age: 36
Career mentors: Nancy Krieger, Mary Bassett, Sharrelle Barber, Maeve Wallace, Yvonne Michael
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty members: In the beginning of my postdoc, my mentor Sharrelle Barber advised that I take time to reflect on and write down my “why”. Why do you want to do this work? I try to hold true to these commitments, and to work towards health justice.
Dr. Jackie Jahn
Jahn is assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements and Population Health Equity at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
As an undergrad at Barnard College in New York City, she majored in neuroscience and psychology, but it was her minor in sociology that spoke to her passion.
“I was always really interested in this intersection between science and society, biology, and its social context,” she recalls. “But at the time, I was doing research in a lab using a mouse model and I was really not seeing the connections between the work that I was doing on that very granular scale and the social world that I was also really interested in.”
Jahn decided to follow her interest and did a few internships in public health – one with a focus on harm reduction. She went on to earn a master’s degree in public health at Harvard University in Boston and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Population Health Sciences, with a concentration in Social Epidemiology, “the study of who gets sick and why,” explains Jahn. “It’s understanding the ways that our social world affects population health — meaning, why certain populations get sick, how they get sick, and what we can do to prevent unavoidable suffering.”
Jahn adds that a fundamental focus of social epidemiology is a concentration on health equity and justice — “understanding the ways that our social world affects population health.” Those social factors could include income, education, neighborhood, social networks and racism.
Jahn’s focus is on racism as a public health issue — particularly with incarcerated populations in the criminal legal system. Her interest, she says, started not as an academic research project, but as an activist.
“I was working in coalitions, that were, and still are, led by currently incarcerated people,” says Jahn. “I wanted to understand and interrupt many of the human rights issues and harms, and especially environmental health issues, which affect incarcerated people.”
Her initial work focused on contaminated water and expanded to medical needs, and now climate change. Jahn was principal investigator on a study that examined extreme heat in U.S. prisons.
Jahn was also principal investigator on a study entitled “The Consequences for Ending Cash Bail for Community Health Equity,” that examined New Jersey as one of the first states to overhaul its system from a “resource-based” to a “risk-based” approach that lessens the financial burden on poor defendants — many of them black Americans — who may not be able to afford bail and must remain in detention awaiting trial.
“I was interested in it, particularly because the effect of this policy meant that rates of jail incarceration in New Jersey reduced dramatically,” says Jahn. “It meant that fewer people were going to jail in New Jersey, and from my community health perspective, I knew there might be important consequences for communities.” The study concluded in December 2025.
Other areas of study for Jahn include reproductive justice, addressing structural racism in the health care system and making the public health case for reparations based on the black-white mortality gap. “We find that nearly a quarter of premature deaths among Black people would be prevented if we, as a society, paid for so many of the harms of enslavement and the continued racialized harms after enslavement,” says Jahn.
“In alignment with the work of the Ubuntu Center, Jackie’s work seeks to address structural racism in the criminal legal system,” says Dr. Kristen Lyall, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and associate professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel. “She has demonstrated strong productivity, early career success, and a commitment to translating her work into action to support the communities she studies.”
