Worker Health Expertise
Sara A. Quandt, PhD
Associate Director for Translation and Education
Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Prevention, Division of Public Health Sciences
Quandt and her colleagues engage in rural health research with North Carolina’s underserved populations.
With federal, state, industry, and advocate funding, they conduct basic research on pesticide exposure among Latino farmworkers and their families and on occupational health among immigrant poultry processing workers; develop, test, and implement safety interventions; and initiate policy-relevant research at the request of the immigrant worker and medical communities in areas such as oral health, food insecurity, housing, and skin disease.
Quandt serves on the Health and Safety Advisory Committee of the East Coast Migrant Head Start Program. She chairs the External Scientific Advisory Committee for the NIDCR Collaborating Research Centers to reduce Oral Health Disparities. She has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications related to health disparities and rural health, as well as numerous health education and continuing medical education publications.
She received the 2003 Praxis Award (Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists) and the 2006 National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) Innovative Research Award for Worker Health and Safety. In 2007, she received the Outstanding Rural Health Researcher Award of the National Rural Health Association. She was named Outstanding Senior Faculty Researcher in 2007 by the Division of Public Health Sciences, Wake Forest School of Medicine.