National women’s health advocate Byllye Avery to speak at Rice Feb. 7

Byllye Avery, founder of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, will give a talk on the state of American women’s health as part of the Gray/Wawro Lecture Series Feb. 7 at Rice University.

BYLLYE AVERY

Avery’s talk, “The State of Women’s Health Today: An Unfinished Agenda,” will be at 6 p.m. in Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium.

As founder of the Black Women’s Health Imperative (formerly the National Black Women’s Health Project) and the Avery Institute for Social Change, Avery has dedicated the last 30 years to advocate for and raise awareness of women’s health issues. Winner of the MacArthur Foundation Genius award, she has been honored throughout her career, including with Lifetime Television’s Trailblazer Award, Essence Magazine’s Award for Community Service and the president’s citation of the American Public Health Association. She is an adviser to the National Institutes of Health, was a visiting fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and is a former faculty member at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Through the support of Melanie Gray and Mark Wawro, this lecture series recognizes health as a matter of physical and social well-being and highlights gender as a key factor determining opportunity and quality of life. Each lecture brings to Houston a leading scholar whose work inspires deeper understanding of the gender features underlying urgent health concerns and fosters public conversation that can prompt informed action toward a more just world.

Hosted by Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, the event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and RSVPs are requested to rsvp.to.cswgs@rice.edu.