The Mary Amelia Center has official rebranded as the Mary Amelia Center for Women’s Health Equity Research. It will retain MAC as a shortened name for the center.
The name was developed by, voted on, and vetted by current staff, faculty, and community partners.
This new name aligns more closely with the center’s mission to conduct interdisciplinary research that identifies and disrupts barriers to knowledge, opportunity, and health for women and their communities. The MAC team of researchers and staff pursues this mission by explicitly naming sources of oppression (racism, sexism, classism, others) and all of the forms they take (internalized, interpersonal, institutional, systemic, and structural) as fundamental causes of population health inequities.
The center was originally established in 2003 as part of the part of the Tulane-Xavier Center of Excellence in Women’s Health.
Mary Amelia Douglas-Whited, the center’s namesake, is remembered for her prioritization of organizations that address broad societal issues in innovative and evolving ways. What began as a center for clinical outreach has progressed into a research center focused on:
- the places where women are born, live, work, and play
- the policies that shape those places as protective or harmful to health
- and the very structure and functioning of a society that dictates the distribution of power and resources across the population.
Center leaders say that the new name reflects the transformation in this regard.