Investigator Rashon M Lane, Ph.D., MA

Dr. Rashon Lane (she/her) is a Senior Health Equity Researcher in the Institute for Advancing Health Equity (IAHE). She is a medical sociologist, with a 20-year career in public health, holding expertise in developing interventions and applied research addressing the root causes of health, specifically in cardiovascular disease and mental health.

Dr. Lane currently leads the mental and behavioral health equity innovation lab in IAHE, where she focuses on community informed theories , innovative interventions and mixed methods research to improve patient health. She is also leading qualitative and quantitative studies in Long COVID to better understand lived experiences of Sutter Health patients living with Long COVID and to provide quality care and treatment. As an expert in cardiovascular prevention, Dr. Lane is currently designing implementation science research to inform equitable health care treatment for cardiometabolic disease including hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Lane is driven to center marginalized communities in the research process with the aim of equitable research that focuses on justice and healing.

Prior to joining Sutter Health, Rashon served as a Senior Health Scientist/Behavioral Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 15 years. As an expert in the design and implementation of applied research and program evaluation, her work focuses on building community-clinical linkage interventions and applying health equity principles in public health programs. While at CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, she led the development of health equity indicators in cardiovascular disease project. As the PI for the Grady Hospital Heart Failure Program evaluation, she assessed the integration of SDOH measures into electronic health records to successfully provide health equity interventions and reduce heart failure readmissions. In 2020, during the CDC's COVID-19 response, she served as team lead for the Minority and Rural Health and Monitoring and Evaluation teams. She also served as the PI for behavioral and epidemiological studies on long-COVID and the team lead for the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative in the Division of STD Prevention.

Dr. Lane completed her doctorate in medical sociology at the University of California San Francisco, where she focused on community trauma and the biomedicalization of Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone in the aftermath of the 2014-16 West Africa Ebola epidemic. She also holds a master's from Claremont Graduate University and bachelors from Tuskegee University in psychology.