PHILADELPHIA, October 29, 2026 — The Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University Beasley School of Law announces today that Ruqaiijah Yearby, JD, MPH, has assumed the role of center director.
In her new role, Professor Yearby, who joined the Beasley School of Law last year as the Judge Clifford Scott Green Chair in Law, will lead the effort to expand the Center’s strategic vision and research priorities to include health justice. She brings decades of experience in bioethics, civil rights, health care law, and legal epidemiology to her leadership.
Professor Yearby will work closely with founding director Scott Burris, JD, who will maintain his portfolio of funded research projects, as well as continue his work promoting legal epidemiology and improving research methods and technology.
“Lead by Professor Yearby, the Center for Public Health Law Research will continue to serve as a pacesetter in the fields of public health law and legal epidemiology, supporting its implementation and application to practice, teaching its next generation of professionals, and considering key methodological questions about how law impacts people, especially those in marginalized populations,” said Burris. “I have full faith in her ability to take this work to new heights.”
Under Yearby’s directorship, the Center will maintain its strategic approach centered on research leadership; capacity building; education and training; as well as communication, translation, collaboration, and partnership. She plans to integrate her health justice research with the Center’s work in legal epidemiology to illustrate how law has helped and harmed communities. Her recent grant funded work uses both legal epidemiology to highlight the inequitable enforcement of eviction laws in Philadelphia and the Health Justice Framework to provide recommendations as well as tools for achieving justice.
“Legal epidemiology establishes critical evidence that can be used to create equitable societies. In the past, we have created legal datasets to better understand how law and policy influence health, which we will continue to do. Under my leadership, we will use this evidence and the Health Justice Framework to show the best ways for policymakers and public health officials to support health and well-being for everyone, particularly for disadvantaged communities” said Yearby. “I am honored to step into the director role at the Center for Public Health Law Research and remain committed to the Center’s work and mission.”
Before coming to Temple University and the Center for Public Health Law Research, Professor Yearby co-founded the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity. She has received more than $5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study disadvantaged indices, the equitable enforcement of housing laws, and structural racism in the health care system. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences. She recently served as a keynote speaker for the 18th World Congress of Bioethics and is a member of the National Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections. Yearby’s scholarship can be found on Google Scholar here.
Yearby has held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School, The Ohio State University, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, Saint Louis University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Connecticut, University of Buffalo, and Loyola University Chicago. She also worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as an Assistant Regional Counsel and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.