Emily B. Zimmerman

Emily Zimmerman is an associate professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Family Medicine and Population Health, Division of Eidemiology. She is a senior researcher at the VCU Center on Society and Health, where she is director of community engaged research and qualitative research. She received her M.P.H. from the University of South Carolina, Arnold School of Public Health; Ph.D. in sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center; and M.S. in social research from Hunter College. Her work focuses on social determinants of health, placed-based determinants of health, and community and stakeholder engagement. She developed the SEED Method for Stakeholder Engagement in Question Development and Prioritization, a multi-stakeholder methodology for involving stakeholders in research development. She also helped to found the Engaging Richmond community-university partnership at VCU in 2011 to identify and address the health priorities of residents in Richmond′s East End. Currently, she is partnering with investigators at Virginia Tech, with funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service, to use the SEED Method to develop community action plans to address the opioid crisis in a rural Virginia community.