Rate My Professor Hoda Abdel Magid

Dr. Hoda Abdel Magid is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and an Assistant Professor of Spatial Sciences at the USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Health Sciences in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a B.S. in Biology and Public Health Sciences from Santa Clara University. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Abdel Magid served as an instructor and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. She actively contributes to university governance, including as Secretary of the Faculty Council at the Keck School of Medicine and as a member of the USC Academic Senate.

Dr. Abdel Magid's research focuses on understanding how place affects health, examining the influence of social determinants such as income and employment on chronic disease behaviors and outcomes. She investigates disproportionate health risks faced by socially and racially marginalized communities due to physical and social environmental factors. Her work develops epidemiologic frameworks that integrate electronic health records, survey data, and geographic information systems (GIS) with spatial methods to reduce health disparities. Current projects address spatial social polarization's effects on hypertension and dementia, neighborhood influences on aging and survival to old age, adolescent factors contributing to young adult chronic diseases, and disparities in COVID-19 outcomes. Key publications include "Association between spatial social polarisation and high blood pressure in older adults" (Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2025), "Opportunities and shortcomings of AI for spatial epidemiology and health disparities research on aging and the life course" (Health & Place, 2024), "Effects of residential socioeconomic polarization on high blood pressure among nursing home residents" (Health & Place, 2024), "Neighborhood factors and survival to old age: The Jackson Heart Study" (Preventive Medicine Reports, 2023), and "Adolescent individual, school, and neighborhood influences on young adult hypertension risk" (PLoS One, 2022). Her scholarship has been cited more than 1,700 times, underscoring her impact in social epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and health disparities research.