Irene Doherty

Over her 25-year career as an epidemiologist and biostatistician, Irene Doherty has led or contributed to every phase of the research process, from formulating specific aims, protocol development and oversight, and analysis, to publishing findings. With experience working at the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the private sector in two semi-NIH-funded premier research institutes (New England Research Institutes and RTI International), and in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as freelancing, she has developed approaches to research from multiple lenses.

After a 3-year period of working in private industry and freelancing, she returned to academia at NCCU in 2019 in various capacities as part of the RCMI Center for Health Disparities Research, which fits well with her previous academic research surrounding health disparities among diverse underserved racial/ethnic minorities in both rural and urban locales. Her current research focuses on social determinants of COVID-19 pandemic disparities, long COVID, vaccine hesitancy, HBCU student risks for COVID-19 and HIV, and food insecurity.

Since NIMHD awarded NCCU’s second cycle for the RCMI (in 2023), she became the director of the Data Analytics and Research Methods subcore within the Research Capacity Core. In addition to providing services to faculty, her knowledge and research skills continue to grow using advancing technologies and NIH paradigms. They include NIH priorities for NIMHD is launching a similar program to increase health equity using federated datasets.