Eugenia C. South

Eugenia (Gina) South is the faculty director of the Center for Health Justice. She is also the associate vice president of health justice for the University of Pennsylvania Health System and an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Gina’s research and community action agenda is focused on dismantling structural racism and promoting environmental and economic justice. She leads work developing and testing individual and neighborhood-level interventions to improve health and well-being for residents in Black and other minoritized communities. She has a particular interest in urban nature and the relationship between nature and health. She has studied a variety of place-based interventions including vacant lot greening, abandoned house remediation, tree planting, and structural repairs to homes. Gina is excited to launch the Health Justice Transformation portfolio for the health system, which will initially include scaling Lift Every Voice (a program designed to collect and respond to racism in the health care workplace) and determining how the health system can contribute to closing the racial wealth gap.  
 
Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gina’s work has been published in JAMA, NEJM, PNAS, and AJPH and covered by national and international media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Time Magazine.

Gina earned her MD from Washington University School of Medicine and her MSHP from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.