Dr. Mignonne C. Guy is an associate professor with tenure in the Department of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University where she teaches courses on health inequities in Black populations, race and racism in the U.S., and interdisciplinary research methods. Dr. Guy is a member of the Massey Cancer Center Cancer Prevention and Control Group and the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds several national advisory positions including as a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.  She is founding co-chair and a current member of the Racial and Equity Task Force in the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and an advisory board member for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Building Capacity to Reduce Tobacco Inequities in the South and Midwest Initiative.

Dr. Guy’s research centers on behavioral, social, and structural determinants that contribute to health inequities among minoritized populations and other marginalized groups. She has a strong interest in using critical race, epistemic oppression, and socioecological lenses to examine the complex interplay between distal and proximal factors that influence health in people of African descent. Recently, she has expanded her research focus to examine the ways in which systemic racism is reproduced in academia and in biomedical and health equity research. Dr. Guy has published over 60 manuscripts in tobacco control and tobacco regulatory science research. She is the principal investigator of the project entitled, Eliminating Systemic Racism in Commercial Tobacco Control Research funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Grant no. 79456, PI: Guy) where she leads a transdisciplinary team to interrogate the role of research in reproducing systemic racism and tobacco-related health inequities and to develop and disseminate an antiracist and equity-centered road map focused on eliminating tobacco-related inequities among Black tobacco users. Dr. Guy is also a multiple principal investigator (MPI), co-project director of the Investigator Development Core (IDC), director of social justice integration and an MPI of Project 4: Black Health Block Quit and Screen Project in the NIH/NIMHD funded Center for Research, Health, and Social Justice (1P50MD017319-01, MPIs: Cornell, Fagan, Guy).  As co-project director of the IDC and director of social justice implementation and integration in health research, Dr. Guy leads the development and training of scientists and community members in anti-racist methods to conduct cancer prevention and control and cardiovascular disease research in Black and/or rural communities and she assesses implementation of the core elements of social justice in health research. In partnership with the National Medical Association, as MPI of the Black Health Block Quit and Screen Project she co-leads a study to test a tailored clinician training and education campaign aimed to increase smoking cessation and promote lung cancer screening among high-risk Black adults. For over 9 years, she has been a co-investigator and site lead investigator in the FDA/NIDA funded VCU Center for the Study of Tobacco Products (U54DA036105; MPIs: Eissenberg & Breland) where she develops innovative methods to surveille emerging tobacco products on the market and uses these data to inform tobacco product regulation.