Fernando De Maio, PhD, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received a BA (Hons.) degree in Sociology and Economics from the University of Toronto, and his MA (Sociology and Health Studies) and PhD (Sociology) degrees from the University of Essex. His research and teaching interests lie primarily within medical sociology and social epidemiology, with a focus on the concept of structural violence and the social determinants of health. His work has been guided by the notion of 'radical statistics' – the idea that statistical analysis can be used to not just describe the world, but to change it.
He is the author of Health & Social Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Global Health Inequities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and co-editor of Latin American Perspectives on the Sociology of Health and Illness (Routledge, 2018), Community Health Equity: A Chicago Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and most recently, Unequal Cities: Structural Racism and the Death Gap in America's Largest Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
His work appears in a wide range of academic journals, including the American Journal of Public Health, Critical Public Health, Global Public Health, the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, the International Journal of Epidemiology, and the New England Journal of Medicine. He serves as an associate editor of Health Sociology Review and is also on the editorial board of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.
Fernando was a founding co-director of the
Center for Community Health Equity, which was founded by DePaul University and Rush University in 2015. In 2019, he was a Research Fellow at the Sinai Urban Health Institute. In 2020, Professor De Maio joined the American Medical Association's Center for Health Equity as Director of Research and Data Use.
Research Interests
- Medical Sociology, including the structural and social determinants of health, the health effects of income inequality, immigration, and racism/discrimination
- Social Inequality, including poverty, social exclusion, and income distribution
- Latin America, particularly Argentina
- Chicago
- Quantitative Data Analysis
Books
Benjamins, MR., and De Maio, FG. (eds.) (2021). Unequal Cities: Structural Racism and the Death Gap in America's Largest Cities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
De Maio, FG., Shah, R.C., Mazzeo, J., & Ansell, D. (eds.) (2019).
Community Health Equity: A Chicago Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Maio, FG, Llovet, I., & Dinardi, G. (eds.)(2019).
Latin American Perspectives on the Sociology of Health and Illness. London: Routledge
De Maio, FG. (2014).
Global Health Inequities: A Sociological Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Maio, FG. (2010).
Health & Social Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Recent Articles
Ansell, DA, James, B., and De Maio FG. (2022). A call for antiracist action. New England Journal of Medicine. 387(1):e1
Liao, TF and De Maio, FG. (2021). Association of social and economic inequality with coronavirus disease 2019 incidence and mortality across US counties. JAMA Network Open, 4(1):e2034578.
Metzl, J., Maybank, A., and De Maio, FG. (2020). Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic: The need for a structurally competent health care system. Journal of the American Medical Association, 324(3):231-232
Pallok, K., De Maio., and Ansell, D. (2019). Structural Racism: A 60-Year-Old African-American woman with breast cancer.
New England Journal of Medicine, 380(16): 1489-1493.De Maio, FG, and Ansell, D. (2018) "As natural as the air around us": On the origin and development of the concept of structural violence in health research.
International Journal of Health Services.
De Maio, FG, Llovet, I, and Dinardi, D. (2017). Latin American health sociology.
Health Sociology Review, 26(3): 221-223.
De Maio, FG, Shah, RC, Schipper, K., Gurdiel, R. & Ansell, D. (2017). Racial/ethnic minority segregation and low birth weight: a comparative study of Chicago and Toronto community-level indicators.
Critical Public Health, 27(5): 541-553.
De Maio, FG & Shah, RC. (2016). A community response to a public health advertisement.
American Journal of Public Health, 106(11): 1979.
De Maio, FG., Konfino, J., Ondarsuhu, D., Goldberg, L., Linetzky, B., Ferrante, D. (2015). Sex-stratified and age-adjusted social gradients in tobacco in Argentina and Uruguay: evidence from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS).
Tobacco Control, 24(6): 562-7.
Konfino, J., De Maio, FG, Ondarsuhu, D., Goldberg, L., Ferrante, D., and Linetzky, B. (2015). The sociodemographic patterning of opposition to raising taxes on tobacco and restricting tobacco advertisements in Argentina.
Public Health, 129(4): 364-9.
De Maio, FG, Llovet, I., & Dinardi, G. (2014). Chagas disease in non-endemic countries: ‘sick immigrant’ phobia or a public health concern?
Critical Public Health, 24(3): 372-380.
De Maio, FG. (2014). Regression analysis and the sociological imagination.
Teaching Statistics, 36(2): 52-57.
Other Publications