Dr. Juanita J. Chinn (she/her) is a sociologist and demographer with two decades of health disparities research and data policy experience. She has been invited to provide written expert testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and has been quoted in the popular press including The Guardian, NPR, and The Today Show. Dr. Chinn is an elected member of the Population Association of America’s Board of Directors where she co-chairs the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. She was recently recognized with an NICHD Director’s merit award for her leadership that has contributed to the successful advancement of research on the social determinants of health disparities and maternal morbidity and mortality.

Dr. Chinn earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology, with a specialization in demography, from the University of Texas at Austin. She trained as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She holds an Sc.B. in applied mathematics and psychology from Brown University.

She currently serves as a senior program official in the Population Dynamics Branch at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. There, she directs a robust research and training portfolio on human mortality, population composition, and the demography of health and health disparities.  She also co-chairs NICHD’s Maternal Health Coordinating Committee. Before joining NICHD in 2017, Dr. Chinn was the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health’s Health Disparities Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Chinn was born and raised in Camden, NJ. She is passionate about providing a voice, or a microphone, to those muted by society. She enjoys serving on her family reunion’s non-profit scholarship committee, trying new restaurants, attending plays, and “kicking it” with friends and family.