Elizabeth A. Howell

Biography

Elizabeth A. Howell, M.D., M.P.P. is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Health Evidence & Policy, Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science, and Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  Her research interests include understanding and narrowing racial disparities in health and healthcare and addressing the health needs of low-income women of color, especially as they relate to antepartum and postpartum care.  Dr. Howell's primary research foci are postpartum depression and infant mortality disparities.

As a faculty member at Mount Sinai, Dr. Howell received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Minority Faculty Development Award and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) funding to conduct a series of studies investigating the association between personal, environmental, and contextual factors with postpartum depressive symptoms in minority and majority women.  She currently receives NIH (NCMHD) funding to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of a patient education intervention aimed at reducing the frequency of depressive symptoms among postpartum Black and Hispanic mothers.  She was recently awarded funding by NIMH to expand this trial to include women from all racial and ethnic backgrounds.  Dr. Howell was recently named a Committee Member, for the Committee on Depression, Parenting Practices, and the Healthy Development of Young Children of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

In addition to her research on postpartum depression, Dr. Howell has conducted studies on infant mortality disparities.  She received funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to conduct a series of studies on infant mortality disparities. She recently published a landmark manuscript in Pediatrics that highlights Black/White disparities in very low birth weight mortality in New York City.  Her research on infant mortality disparities has received both local and national attention.  She has presented this work to the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene, the National Disparities Summit in Washington D.C. and to the National Center for Health Statistics. She has also conducted research on postpartum women's satisfaction with care, racial disparities in other areas in women's health, and treatment appropriateness. She has expertise with both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Dr. Howell received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and received her medical and public policy degrees at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She received her residency training at Cornell /New York Hospital and is a board certified obstetrician gynecologist. Dr. Howell received her training in clinical epidemiology as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale Medical School.