My Intellectual Home Posted on January 20, 2009 Hortensia Amaro (bio) recounts how she found her academic niche in a school of public health.

I came to issues of urban health later on in my career.

When I think of it, I've always had this very broad perspective of trying to understand the context, but in my training I didn't have the language for that because in psychology the training, especially back then, was very individualistic.

And in fact I was always being told, "You really should go to anthropology or sociology because we don't deal with those kind of issues." I remember one of my first graduate courses in social psychology, and I saw that we were going to study aggression. And I was so excited. So it was the first class, and I asked, "Well, are we going to be studying racism and the impact of racism on violence?" And they said, "Oh, no. We don't study that."

And I was so disappointed that we were studying Bobo dolls and modeling of aggressive behavior at a very individualistic level without really thinking more broadly about the context and more institutional forms of violence and even family forms of violence.

But that's okay because I kept that perspective with me, and I always felt that through my graduate work I didn't want to lose that. And so I did my own side readings. I always had my own list of readings that continued to inform that perspective because I found the perspective from purely psychological, looking only at the individual, very limiting.

When I got out of graduate school it was the Reagan years, and jobs in research were being cut. And there were really very few academic jobs available.

So I ended up not going to a department of psychology; I ended up going to school of medicine and eventually to a school of public health.

And eventually actually that ended up being a great advantage because it opened up a whole new way of looking at health issues, the public health perspective. I was in fact a professor of public health for many years, and have been through my career. That's really been sort of my intellectual home is more the public health arena.

So that really provided an environment where I could think more about the broader issues, and of course in the last five to ten years public health has even begun to recognize and have language for the broader contextual issues. And especially this field of urban health and looking at how environments, including neighborhoods, the physical and social features of communities, impact on health and on health disparities. And that's very much the cutting edge of the work now in public health.