Dane Emmerling, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor
Department of health behavior
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Dane Emmerling is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health focused on teaching. Dane’s pedagogy is centered on the process of sociopolitical development through which individuals increase their analytic skills and capacity to build a healthier and more just world. He researches and evaluates critical consciousness raising interventions, or experiences and programs that shift individuals’ and institutions’ attitudes and behaviors about their participation in systems. Most recently, this work has been in the form of partnering with the Racial Equity Institute (REI) to evaluate their Phase 1 training on structural racism. The partnership involved 1) interviewing the community organizers who lead the REI trainings and the organizations who book REI for training, 2) conducting a quantitative evaluation of changes in participants’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors with more than two thousand training participants, and 3) writing a case study on a system change process led by one of REI’s partners that involves judges, teachers, social workers among other stakeholders, who are coming together to collectively shift the disproportionate outcomes in the juvenile justice system in their city. Dane also researches experiential education pedagogy and impact. Before starting the PhD, Dane worked in global health evaluation and in service-learning offices supporting universities linkages with community organizations.