Tasleem Padamsee, PhD

Dr. Padamsee is a sociologist by training and brings theoretical and methodological tools from sociology and women’s studies to bear on public health problems. She is a scholar of health disparities and health systems, whose research program explores the intersections of social inequality, public policy, and health care. Dr. Padamsee is the Principal Investigator of the Daughter Sister Mother Project, which conducts multi-method studies of how diverse women at elevated risk for breast cancer make prevention decisions and how women can better be supported to manage their cancer risks. Funded by a K01 award from the National Cancer Institute as well as the OSU Cancer Control Program and the Stefanie Spielman Fund, these studies have documented racial disparities in access to breast cancer prevention methods, gaps in population-based screening programs to identify high-risk women, and more.

Since early 2020, Dr. Padamsee has been intensively involved in COVID-19 response, recovery, and research activities. She has helped shape Ohio’s response to COVID-19 in vulnerable populations as a member of the Health Equity Workgroup at the Ohio Department of Health, co-authored Ohio’s COVID-19 Populations Needs Assessment with Dr. Julianna Nemeth, helped design a federally funded initiative to increase COVID testing across Ohio and the OSU Wexner Medical Center’s mass COVID-19 vaccination site to advance regional health equity, and co-leads the C3-REACH research team (Committed to Communities Collaborative: Research and Engagement to Advance beyond COVID to Health Equity). Dr. Padamsee’s comparative research on HIV/AIDS policies in the United States and United Kingdom has documented the distinct ways each country responded to that pandemic over 35 years, and the origins of those differences in political and health institutions, cultural contexts, and political mobilization at the national level. Dr. Padamsee also leads the qualitative components of a multi-million-dollar comparative effectiveness study of workers’ compensation policies to decrease unsafe opioid prescribing among injured workers and serves as qualitative methodologist and mixed methods consultant on studies of several other topics.