This June, Dr. Erica Payton Foh was selected as the first permanent faculty fellow of UNCG’s Center for Housing and Community Studies, or CHCS.
As faculty fellow, Payton Foh will collaborate with the CHCS team on applied projects, mentor students, and help to develop community-based solutions to pressing issues in the areas of housing, health, and community safety.
“We attribute the success of our center in part to our strong interdisciplinary collaborations,” says CHCS director Bruce Rich. “We draw on faculty expertise in public health, education, the humanities, economics, social work and beyond to conduct our work, and faculty fellowships allow us to formalize our relationships with frequent university collaborators.”
Payton Foh, an associate professor in public health education, begins her new fellowship as co-principal investigator on a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project examining housing code enforcement systems. However, this is far from her first collaboration with the CHCS, where she held a rotating faculty fellowship position in 2020.
Payton Foh’s research agenda, which takes a social ecology perspective, focuses on health disparities and equity, particularly in the realms of firearm violence, intimate partner violence, and community and neighborhood violence. In 2022, she was a RAND Faculty Leaders Fellow in Policy Research and Analysis, and policy strategies are an integral component of her teaching and scholarship.
