Courtney Thomas Tobin

Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and Department of Community Health Sciences

Courtney S. Thomas Tobin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health with a joint appointment in the UCLA African American Studies Department. She is also a Faculty Associate in the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

Dr. Thomas Tobin earned a PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA prior to joining the faculty in 2016. Her primary areas of interest include the psychobiology of stress and coping, racial health disparities, aging and the life course, and social stratification.

Drawing on her training in medical sociology, Dr. Thomas Tobin uses mixed-method, transdisciplinary approaches to identify sources of psychosocial risk and resilience that contribute to gender and socioeconomic health disparities among African Americans. In recent research, she applies a new framework, “The Racial Self-Awareness (RSA) Framework of Race-Based Stress, Coping, and Health” to conceptualize and evaluate the ways racial minority status transforms stress and coping processes to produce distinct patterns of psychological and physiological health for African Americans.