Eugenia (Gina) South, MD, MSHP is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, as well as the Faculty Director for the Penn Urban Health Lab. As a physician-scientist, her broad vision is to improve health and quality of life for residents in low-resource and Black communities through both research and clinical work. Dr. South’s research agenda is focused on developing and testing individual and neighborhood level interventions to better understand the ways in which the physical and social attributes of where people live, work, and play influence physical and mental health, and community safety. Her work on vacant lot greening has been published in JAMA Network Open, PNAS, and AJPH, and has appeared in national and international media outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR, and Time Magazine.

Her current work includes an RWJ-funded community-led micro-greening efforts, developing a peer-navigator intervention with a behavioral economics framework to increase the amount of time people spend in urban nature, evaluating the impact of structural housing repairs on crime, a CDC funded study to evaluate the impact of blight remediation and an alternative response unit on opioid overdose in Philadelphia, and a series of studies evaluating the impact of violent crime on acute care utilization. Dr. South is also passionate about diversity, inclusion, and antiracism and currently serves as co-chair of the PennEM Diversity Committee and is a member of the Penn-CHOP Alliance of Minority Physicians Faculty Steering Committee.

Dr. South received her MD from Washington University School of Medicine in 2008, and her MSHP from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, during which time she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

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