Denine Crittendon, PHD, MPH

Denine Crittendon, PHD, MPH, a CRTA Fellow under the Intramural Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences (iCURE), will be joining the Health Assessment Research Branch (HARB) within the Healthcare Delivery Research Program. She will be working with her HARB mentor, Dr. Amy Davidoff, as well as others in HDRP, on research projects related to health equity issues involving financial hardship related to cancer care treatment utilization.

Prior to joining NCI, Denine was an instructor in the Master of Public Health program within the College of Population Health (JCPH) at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA. She taught Cultural Competency and Humility, Foundations of Statistics for Practice in Excel, and Intro to Public Health. Her work in health equity and health services research employs historical, contextual, cultural, and theoretical lenses to investigate upstream structures and processes in healthcare delivery to identify how and where racism contributes to quality-of-care disparities. Her time within HARB will allow her to examine patient, provider, and system-level factors that influence cancer-related health services through initiatives managed within HDRP.

Denine’s health equity and health services research background is reflected in peer-reviewed publications within various scientific journals and commitment to disparities. Specifically, her work examined: (1) perceived racism and how it affects prostate cancer screening rates and discussions among black and white men (Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved) and (2) organizational readiness to improve quality for family medicine residence (PRiMER, a scholarly journal of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine). Denine was also a part of the Jefferson CPH’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Workgroup as well as a Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity Committee for which she was a co-lead on this activity.

Denine earned her BA in Sociology from Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) in 2008 and her MPH from Thomas Jefferson University. She recently completed her PhD in Population Health Sciences at Jefferson in May 2024.