Dr. Sarah Blake

Assistant Professor, Health Policy and Management

February 15, 2021

Dr. Sarah Blake’s career is grounded in research and advocacy for women. In her first job, she worked in Washington, DC, at the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (now known as the National Partnership for Women & Families), where she and her colleagues successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This experience fueled her passion for women’s health and public policy. She received her Master of Public Policy, with a concentration in Women’s Studies, at George Washington University. While in school, she began working at the GW Center for Health Policy Research. It was at this job that she discovered her deep interest in women’s health, Medicaid policy and program evaluation. Dr. Blake worked at GW for six more years after graduation as a Research Scientist.

In 2001, Dr. Blake moved home to Atlanta and began work at Rollins School of Public Health as a Senior Associate in the Department of Health Policy and Management (HPM), collaborating frequently with Dr. Kathleen Adams on a variety of women’s health policy projects. While working full-time in HPM, Dr. Blake completed her PhD in the Georgia Tech/Georgia State University Joint Program in Public Policy.

Dr. Blake has a diverse research portfolio, and she encourages students to develop a variety of interests as well. For example, she has a number of projects that examine the delivery of reproductive health services for low-income women. She leads a study of the landscape of Title X family planning services in Georgia and works on the Emory team that evaluates Georgia’s Medicaid family planning program. She also co-leads a study for the CDC to examine the implementation of state breast and cervical cancer programs that utilize community-clinical linkages to expand screening for hard-to-reach and unscreened women.

Along with Emory MCH CoE director Dr. Michael Kramer, Dr. Blake is currently working on a CDC-funded project that incorporates a health equity toolkit to enhance the ability of state Maternal Mortality Review Committees to examine social and community level factors of maternal deaths. Dr. Blake feels this work is becoming even more important as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates health disparities, particularly among marginalized and low-income communities. She has recently received pilot funding for two COVID-related studies. One study focuses on the psychosocial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnant and postpartum women in Georgia, and the other study examines the impact of the pandemic on the delivery of home visiting services in Georgia.

In addition to research, Dr. Blake is also a passionate teacher. When she realized there were no courses providing an overview of women’s health policy, she created HPM 569: Women’s Health Policy: A Lifecycle Approach to fill the gap. She also teaches HPM 533: Qualitative Methods for Health Services Research. For her teaching, Dr. Blake received the first HPM Teaching Award in 2012. Recently, Dr. Blake received a Women of Excellence Award from the Emory University Center for Women, as the 2021 recipient of the Award for Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy. Dr. Blake encourages students to reach out to professors whose work interests them since faculty could always use some help with their projects. According to Dr. Blake, “You never know where opportunities will lead you, just try it!”