Biography

Dr. Mignonne C. Guy is an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Family Medicine and Population Health in the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Guy is the founder and co-chair of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences Committee on Racial Equity (CORE) and of the Committee on Racial Equity Student Advisory Group (CORE SAG). As co-chair of CORE, Dr. Guy led a community-engaged initiative to develop and implement a racial literacy requirement in the foundations of the VCU general education curriculum, and the development and implementation of the first interdisciplinary curricula on race and racism for health sciences and the general undergraduate student population in Virginia. The structure of this requirement and the model to achieve it is the first in the nation. Dr. Guy is a member of the Massey Cancer Center Cancer Prevention and Control Group at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Dr. Guy also holds several national advisory positions including as a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee, founding co-chair of the Racial and Equity Task Force and current member of the Racial Equity Committee in the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, an advisory board member for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Building Capacity to Reduce Tobacco Inequities in the South and Midwest Initiative, and a Mid-Atlantic Regional Lead for the Intercultural Cancer Council. Prior to her arrival in 2014 at VCU, she held appointments as a research associate in the Department of Health Sciences Research at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, an assistant research scientist in the Center for Health Outcomes and Pharmacoeconomic Research, a fellow in the R25T Cancer Prevention and Control Postdoctoral Fellowship program in the Arizona Cancer Center at the University of Arizona. She is a former health disparities scholar for the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Research Interests

Dr. Guy's research explores the social and structural determinants driving health inequities in cancer and chronic diseases among minoritized populations and other marginalized groups, as well as interventions to address these disparities. Her work employs critical race theory, epistemic oppression frameworks, and ecosocial approaches to examine the intricate relationships between distal and proximal factors influencing health and outcomes, with a particular focus on Black populations in the U.S.  Dr. Guy has recently broadened her research focus to investigate ways in which systemic racism is reproduced in academic research and, in particular, in population and health equity research. Dr. Guy has published over 60 manuscripts in tobacco prevention and control research and tobacco regulatory sciences. She is an MPI in the NIH/NIMHD funded Center for Research, Health and Social Justice in the NIH/NIMHD funded Center for Research, Health and Social Justice (CRHSJ) (1P50MD017319-01, MPIs: Cornell, Fagan & Guy), Co-Director of the CRHSJ Investigator Development Core, and MPI of Project 4: Black Health Block Quit and Screen Project. Dr. Guy is also the principal investigator of the project, Eliminating Systemic Racism in Commercial Tobacco Control Research (Grant no. 79456) funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she leads a transdisciplinary team to engage a variety of stakeholders from communities, academic institutions, policymakers, funding agencies and publishing entities from across the nation to interrogate the role of research in reproducing tobacco-related health inequities and to develop and disseminate an antiracist and equity-centered research agenda and road map focused on eliminating tobacco-related inequities among Black tobacco users.  For nearly a decade, she has been a co-investigator and site lead investigator in the FDA/NIDA funded VCU Center for the Study of Tobacco Products (U54DA036105; MPIs: Eissenberg & Breland) where she develops innovative methods to surveille emerging tobacco products on the market and use these data to inform tobacco regulation. Her work utilizes mixed-methods approaches that she applies to transdisciplinary collaborations in clinical and community settings.