Lecture Speaker: Dr. Linda Rae Murray

Dr. Linda Rae Murray has spent her career serving the medically underserved. She has worked in a variety of settings including Medical Director of the federally funded health center, Winfield Moody, which served Cabrini Green Public Housing Project in Chicago, Residency Director for Occupational Medicine at Meharry Medical College and Bureau Chief for the Chicago Department of Health under Mayor Harold Washington. 

Dr. Murray is the recently retired Chief Medical Officer for the Cook County Department of Public Health. She also practiced as a general internist at Woodlawn Health Center, was an attending physician in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Cook County Hospital and is an adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health (Occupational & Environmental Health and the Health Policy & Administration departments). 

Dr. Murray plays a leadership role in many organizations including the National Association of City and County Health Officers Health Equity and Social Justice Team, the national executive board of American Public Health Association and serves on the board of the Chicago based Health and Medicine Policy Research Group. In 2011, Dr. Murray served as President of the American Public Health Association. She is the Co-Chair for the Urban Health Program Community Advisory Committee at UIC. 

Dr. Murray has been a voice for social justice and health care as a basic human right for over forty years. She remains passionate about increasing the number of Black and Latino health professionals.

Action Lab Facilitator: Radical Public Health

Radical Public Health (RPH) is an association of students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members that seeks to address the systemic, underlying causes of public health challenges and to consider more radical solutions. 

“I use the term ‘radical’ in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”        -Ella Baker                                                                                                                       

Action Lab Facilitator: Sari Bilick

Sari Bilick (she/her) is the Organizing Program Director at Human Impact Partners (HIP), based in the Bay Area in California on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land. Sari leads HIP’s organizing work, including co-coordinating Public Health Awakened, a national network of public health professionals organizing for health, equity, and justice. She has over 15 years of experience in organizing and before joining HIP worked in labor, community, and political organizing and brings extensive experience in leadership development, training, and coalition building. Sari has engaged public health practitioners, healthcare and service workers, immigrants, tenants, domestic workers, and faith communities to take action around a wide range of economic and social justice issues. She is passionate about organizing and mobilizing communities around the issues most important to them and bringing a social justice and equity lens into all spaces. 

Lecture Speaker: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UIC

Students for Justice in Palestine at UIC is a Palestinian-student led organization that advocates for a free and liberated Palestine. SJP at UIC also recognizes the Palestinian liberation is not one sided.  Our movement is also aligned with the Black, Queer, and Filipino Liberation movements, as well as any oppressed group of people fighting for their liberation. We recognize that we are truly not free until we are all free. 

SJP at UIC has been organizing on campus for 10+ years. We host educational, solidarity, and cultural events to advocate for a free and liberated Palestine. We also support and hold campaigns and protests on campus to advocate for a safer and more ethical space for all students. Currently, SJP has a campaign against the UIC School of Public Health for their contract they hold with the Jewish United Fund- a racist, islamaphobic, and transphobic organization.  SJP at UIC recognizes that Palestine is a public health crisis, and zionism has no place in our curriculum. 

Action Lab Facilitator: Arturo Carrillo, PhD, LCSW

Arturo Carrillo, Ph.D., LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker and Director of Health and Violence Prevention at Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. He has led the Collaborative for Community Wellness to research and document the inequity of access to quality mental health services throughout low-income communities throughout the city and advocates for the creation of a city-wide non-police crisis response program grounded in an expanded publicly-operated mental health system in Chicago through the Treatment Not Trauma campaign.  

Action Lab Facilitator:  Tiffany N. Ford, MPH, PhD

Tiffany N. Ford (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Community Health Sciences division at the UIC School of Public Health. Her research explores how anti-Black structural racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the resources that contribute to subjective well-being. Specifically, Dr. Ford is interested in place-based policy and practice interventions to support health status, financial security, and social support and relationships, three core determinants of subjective well-being, for people racialized as Black. She is the director of the Black Feminist Policy Lab at UIC, an abolitionist, queer Black feminist learning community that centers love, equity, and truth in the development of a policy agenda to support people racialized as Black in the U.S.. 

Lecture Speaker: Jennifer Brier, PhD

Jennifer Brier directs and is professor in the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC, and is also on the faculty in the History Department. She specializes in US sexuality and gender history as well as public history. Brier is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis, published by the University of North Carolina Press. As a curator, Brier worked with Jill Austin to produce Out in Chicago, the Chicago History Museum’s award-winning exhibition on LGBT history. She also curated “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture,” a traveling exhibition for the National Library of Medicine. As of 2019, a bilingual version (Spanish and English) of the exhibition is touring the country. Brier is at work on a major public history project called History Moves, a community-curated mobile gallery that will provide a space for community organizers and activists to share their histories with a wide audience.

Lecture Speaker: Jacqueline E. Luciano

Disabled RN, COVID-19 Long Hauler, Narrative Architect 

Long COVID Justice (LCJ), a project of Strategies for High Impact, are leading grassroots, collective efforts to confront the Long COVID crisis, while centering racial, social, economic and disability justice. Our work is done by and for chronically ill and disabled people, our families and communities. 

Jacqueline E. Luciano (she/her) is one of LCJ’s Narrative Architects in partnership with Dr. Jennifer Brier’s oral history project, Listening for the Long Haul: A Living History of Long COVID. She’a a first generation Filipino-American, mother of two and wife. She’s also a former Illinois Department of Public Health Surveillance Nurse and was working as a Regulatory Consultant until she became disabled by Long Covid and Associated Diseases (LCAD) in January 2022. Jacquie has experienced firsthand the gaslighting and challenges of navigating a complex healthcare system, especially as Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) still have no FDA-approved treatments. This inspired her to share her story to help reshape public narratives and policies that have traditionally neglected disabled people and people with complex chronic conditions, so that people with lived experience are believed, included, and respected. Jacquie holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Loyola University Chicago. Since receiving beneficial modalities for her own lymphatic system, she aspires to study and be a holistic person-centered Certified Lymphatic Practitioner.

Action Lab Facilitator:  Tiffany N. Ford, MPH, PhD

Tiffany N. Ford (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Community Health Sciences division at the UIC School of Public Health. Her research explores how anti-Black structural racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the resources that contribute to subjective well-being. Specifically, Dr. Ford is interested in place-based policy and practice interventions to support health status, financial security, and social support and relationships, three core determinants of subjective well-being, for people racialized as Black. She is the director of the Black Feminist Policy Lab at UIC, an abolitionist, queer Black feminist learning community that centers love, equity, and truth in the development of a policy agenda to support people racialized as Black in the U.S..