Nebraska’s Minority Health Disparities Initiative will host a talk by Ilan Meyer of the University of California, Los Angeles, at 2 p.m. March 13 in the Nebraska Union’s Regency A.

Meyer is a distinguished senior scholar for public policy at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law and professor emeritus of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University.

The talk will explore Meyer’s research into minority health disparities; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health; and sexual orientation law.

Meyer’s areas of research include stress and illness in minority populations, in particular, the relationship of minority status, minority identity, prejudice and discrimination and mental health outcomes in sexual minorities and the intersection of minority stressors related to sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and gender.

In several highly cited papers, Meyer has developed a model of minority stress that describes the relationship of social stressors and mental disorders and helps to explain LGBT health disparities.

The model has guided his and other investigators’ population research on LGBT health disparities by identifying the mechanisms by which social stressors impact health and describing the harm to LGBT people from prejudice and stigma.

Meyer is also the principal investigator of two studies: the Generations Study, a study of stress, identity, health, and health care utilization across three cohorts of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in the United States; and the TransPop study, the first national probability sample of transgender individuals in the United States.

The study results will provide a more accurate and detailed picture of the issues faced by transgender people than has been available to researchers and policymakers to date.

Meyer’s talk is free and open to the public.