Dr. Bita Amani is the Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor of the BMHCE and the Chair of the Charles R. Drew University Department of Urban Public Health (CDU DUPH). She is also an Associate Professor and currently serves as the Faculty Trustee on CDU’s Board of Trustees.

She graduated from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and was a National Institutes of Mental Health HIV/AIDS Postdoctoral Scholar. She has founded and led numerous initiatives, such as the CDU Cuba Health Exchange and the UCLA-CDU COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity.

As a social epidemiologist, Dr. Amani’s teaching and research focuses on the intersections between community health, racism, politics, and disasters.

With over fifteen years of local and global experience, her work investigates how social disinvestment (allocating fewer resources to a community) and state-sanctioned violence (criminalizing mental health) result in increased morbidity and mortality as well as public health crises.

Dr. Amani’s background puts her in a prime position to advise on the training needs of a workforce ready and able to achieve a world without health disparities.

To this end, she focuses on developing and strengthening solutions that expand community health infrastructure and increase the workforce committed to robust transformations in our existing health system. As a result, she understands the value of collaboration between community midwives, doulas, birth centers, hospitals, and maternity organizations in resolving the Black maternal health crisis.