Jay S. Kaufman Ph.D.
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Disparities
Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health
McGill University
Email: jay.kaufman@mcgill.ca
Discipline: Statistics, Epidemiology
Expertise: Health Care Inequalities, Public and Population Health, Disparities
Investigator Award 
Use of Racial/Ethnic Identity in Medical Evaluations and TreatmentsAward Year: 2005 Views about the importance of race in clinical medicine have come full circle in the past five years as the field of "pharmacogenomics" has ushered in the promise of medical treatments tailored to a patient's particular genetics. Jay S. Kaufman, Ph.D. and Richard S. Cooper, M.D. examine the re-emergence of race as a surrogate for genetic factors that can determine risk of disease, prognosis, and response to treatment. Their project, Use of Racial/Ethnic Identity in Medical Evaluations and Treatments, looks to published studies and surveillance data on health disparities among U.S. racial and ethnic groups for evidence that race should be a factor when considering health interventions. They want to determine whether policies that link race and ethnicity to medical care are scientifically justifiable and to quantify their costs and benefits. Drs. Kaufman and Cooper consider the implications of recruiting patients into clinical trials based on race, federal requirements for reporting trial data by racial group, approving therapies for specific racial/ethnic groups, and using race as a factor in determining therapy and drug dosage.
Background 
Jay S. Kaufman holds a doctorate in epidemiologic science from the University of Michigan (1995). After a post-doctoral position at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine (Chicago, IL) from 1995-1997, he was Medical Epidemiologist at Carolinas Medical Center (Charlotte, NC) from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 through 2008 he held a positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health at Chapel Hill and as Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center. In 2009 he began his current position as Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Disparities in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. He is also currently appointed as Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health of the University of Chile, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, University of Michigan School of Public Health (Ann Arbor, MI), and Adjunct Professor Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC). Dr. Kaufman's work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including perinatal outcomes and cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases. He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”. With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology”. He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
- Kaufman, J.S. Hypertension and Coronary Heart Disease, In Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, ed. Moore, J.H. Detroit: Macmillan References USA, Vol 2, 138-42, 2008.
- Kaufman, J.S. The Salt Retention Hypothesis, In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition, ed. Darity, W.A. New York: Macmillan Reference USA/Thomson Gale, 546-7, 2008.
- Kaufman, J.S. Making Inferences about the Causal Effects of Macro-Social Factors on Health Outcomes, In Macrosocial Determinants of Health, ed. Galea, S. New York: Springer, 2007.
- Kaufman, Jay. Guest Commentary: When Should Race be a Factor in Determining Medical Treatment? Newsletter of New England Research Institutes, Spring 2010, 3.
- Kaufman, J.S., Nguyen, T.T., Cooper, R.S. Race and Medicine, and the Science Behind BiDil: How ACE-Inhibition Took the Fall for the First Ethnic Drug. Review of Black Political Economy , Mar 6 2010.
- Kaufman, J.S., Nguyen, T.T., Whitsel, E.A., Cooper, R.S. White-Black Difference in Blood Pressure Response to Calcium Channel Blocker Monotherapy: A Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Hypertension, Aug 2009, 22(8): 911-7.
- McClamroch, K.J., Behets, F.M., Kaufman, J.S. Decision Analysis for Making Optimal Treatment Decisions Applied to Epidemiology. J of Clinical Epidemiology, 2008, 61(8): 776-87.
- Kaufman, J.S. Dissecting Disparities. Medical Decision Making, 2008, 28(1): 9-11.
- Kaufman, J.S. Epidemiologic Analysis of Racial/Ethnic Disparities: Some Fundamental Issues and a Cautionary Example. Social Science and Medicine, 2008, 66(8): 1659-69.
- Kaufman, J.S., Cooper, R.S. Race in Epidemiology: New Tools, Old Problems. Annals of Epidemiology, 2008, 18(2): 119-23.
- Kaufman, J.S., Cooper, R.S. Telomeres and Race: What Can We Learn about Human Biology from Health Differentials? Aging Cell, 2008, 7(4): 448-50.
- Bolnick, D.A., Fullwiley, D., Duster, T., Cooper, R.S., Fujimura, J.H., Kahn, J., Kaufman, J.S., Marks, J., Morning, A., Nelson, A., Ossorio, P., Reardon, J., Reverby, S., TallBear, K. The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing. Science, 2007,