Researcher | Research Overview
As a social epidemiologist, Dr. Beccia’s research focuses on understanding the social and structural determinants of population-level eating disorder inequities, with a particular focus on inequities affecting LGBTQ+ youth. She also regularly collaborates on projects examining the drivers of mental health inequities more broadly and has a strong interest in integrating causal inference, econometric, and other advanced quantitative methods into this line of work. Alongside her research, Dr. Beccia leads STRIPED’s Eating Disorder Public Health Surveillance Working Group to help improve the monitoring of eating disorders and disordered eating among U.S. youth, especially via the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS).
Researcher | Research Background
Dr. Ariel L. Beccia, PhD (she/her) is a Research Scientist in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and faculty with the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children’s Hospital. She is also a member of Harvard’s Sexual Orientation Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) Health Equity Research Collaborative and the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence. Dr. Beccia received her PhD in epidemiology from the Clinical and Population Health Research program at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, MA, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with STRIPED that was funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD).