Dr. Jennifer Felner (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Promotion and Behavioral Science and the Undergraduate Program Director in the School of Public Health at SDSU.
Dr. Felner completed her undergraduate training in Economics and French at Auburn University in Auburn, AL, and received a Master’s of Public Health (MPH) with concentrations in Health Education and Human Rights at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, GA. For several years, she worked in community- and clinical-based settings developing, implementing, and evaluating child maltreatment prevention programs across GA. Dr. Felner then completed doctoral training in Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and postdoctoral training in social epidemiology and substance use research at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the SDSU Institute for Behavioral and Community Health. Her primary research aim is to advance health equity for youth and build community power to develop sustainable community health improvements that will mitigate and prevent health disparities, particularly among youth experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ+) youth. She enjoys conducting research in partnership with community-based organizations and youth and designing projects that directly respond to community priorities and requests. Although she is a qualitative methodologist by training (and at heart!), Dr. Felner also uses quantitative methods to study multi-level determinants of population-level tobacco and substance use disparities among adolescents and young adults. Dr. Felner states that the best part of her work is training students on how to leverage community-based and participatory research approaches, and diverse methodologies to examine and address pressing community health challenges.
Dr. Felner enjoys hiking, trail running, pickleball, seeing new places, and hanging with her cats.
Click here to view Dr. Jennifer Felner’s live CV.
