Neuron Award laureate Lucie Kalousová has won grants worth CZK 28 million
Lucie Kalousová, laureate of the Neuron Award for promising young scientists for 2019 in the social sciences, has won two prestigious grants worth CZK 28 million.
What is the inequality in access to health and hospice care by skin colour in the United States? African Americans in the USA experience worse quality of health care before death than white people, whether in lower rates of pain relief or of hospice use. "Most research focuses on explanations at the individual level, such as patients' religiosity or health literacy, but does not take account of the historical and present-day marginalisation of Black patients in the US health system," is how Lucie Kalousová, who works with the American professor Deborah Carr, describes what makes her research unique.
How to reduce these racially motivated disparities, or prevent them entirely, is what the pair of researchers are working on with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which awarded them a grant with the fitting name "Evidence for Action" worth 600,000 dollars.
"I am delighted that our laureates are enjoying worldwide success. As early as 2019 we honoured Lucie Kalousová for her research into the connections between social inequality and the health of the population. It is wonderful that she continues to work on these socially important subjects and that her abilities are valued abroad too," says the director and co-founder of the Neuron Foundation Monika Vondráková.
Social inequality is also the subject of Kalousová's other research, specifically the connection between inequality in men's and women's access to work and the development of Alzheimer's disease. Women suffer more often from this disease and the associated dementia, which according to Kalousová is caused not only by biological differences but precisely by structural inequality. "On the basis of earlier research I assume that women's unequal access to employment contributes to their cognitive disadvantage," Kalousová says.
For further research in this area she has received The NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development Award worth over 600,000 dollars. "Essentially it is a grant programme providing financial support from the American National Institutes of Health, thanks to which I will be able to devote myself to research alone for five years," the researcher adds.
We warmly congratulate our laureate and wish her further success in her research with its important social impact!
