1. Bringing Humanity Into The Conversation

Bringing Humanity Into The Conversation Kate LeMasters '15 cultivated a career of addressing public health inequalities with marginalized societies.

By Laura Lemon
September 24, 2025

In a Denver prison, Kate LeMasters '15 gave her students in her prison-based writing course a prompt on food. The final product could tackle a number of themes - their involuntary poor diets, their favorite memories, their least favorite, the symbolism of the food in front of them and more. One incarcerated man wrote a poem.

"It ended with him eating a peach for the first time in 15 years and crying when that happened," LeMasters said. "I think little anecdotes like that can lead to a conversation about these huge injustices in the system - really unhealthy food or whatever it is - and it also brings about elements of humanity."

As a social epidemiologist, LeMasters researches and studies the outside influences and structural systems that impact public health. Specifically, she focuses on the system of mass incarceration and the health inequities that it compounds - taking the perspective of mass incarceration as a public health crisis. Diet, for example, is a factor that influences an individual's well-being and one that greatly affects those incarcerated or previously incarcerated. Climate change is another, with extreme temperatures inside the facilities and smoke exposure from wildfires impacting mental and physical health.

In addition to her research, she volunteers by leading writing workshops in prisons. For her, the human interactions fuel her research passions.

"When I get to go inside and teach or do the workshops, those are my favorite days," she said. "It's cheesy, but it reminds me why I do what I do. I think it's important to be with communities you're also researching with. I learn a lot from incarcerated folks, as well, and education is an important aspect that I'm glad that the prisons have now. I think it just provides kind of a two-way learning opportunity."

And to bridge her two worlds, LeMasters, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, invited her graduate students taking her incarceration and health class to meet with her incarcerated class.

"It was the first time the students had been in a prison," she said. "We talked about it a lot before: what does it mean to go inside these spaces and, also, what does it mean to so easily leave these spaces. … My students [afterwards] spoke a lot to being able to see the humanity of people who are very othered."

"Being able to share [lived experiences] across communities and meet people whose lives have been very different, it's one of the most important things I think we can do as humans," she added. "I just happen to do that in a space where there's a lot of particular red tape to doing that. So, I really try to exchange people's experiences in any way."

LeMasters was a Ph.D. epidemiology student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when she first stepped inside a prison. One of her good friends had become incarcerated, and when she visited him in 2019, she witnessed the toll that it takes on the individual, their families and their communities. She realized, as someone who studied systems that create health inequities, that mass incarceration was missing from her training. That awareness led her to shift her research focus to the carceral system.

"I sought out research in that space and just instantly really loved that work," she said. "It's not a population a lot of people think of, and I often say they're hidden in plain sight."

This passion for the public health of marginalized individuals blossomed at Washington and Lee University in the Bonner Program and the Shepherd Program. And outside of the classroom, LeMasters often sat in Tyler Dickovick's office at his small wooden table, where the late Grigsby Term Professor of Politics helped her navigate the "how to make this a career" question (always with a bag of pistachios in his hand).

"He was really [integral in] helping me form how I could study these health inequities from a more structural lens and look at who received health care, how health care systems play a role in that, how policies play a role in that and other pieces," she said.

Though her resume paints a picture of a clear path, LeMasters admits that she didn't know what she wanted to do and struggled to find her niche. At one point, she wondered if she needed to change her major entirely and go into medicine. But Dickovick offered different perspectives during their office chats. "He just helped me reign in and think about what do you really care about and why - and from what level."

After learning about how individuals during the African AIDS crisis often were excluded from the workforce and lacked access to medication, she took advantage of Dickovick's connections and the Shepherd Program to intern for the West Africa AIDS Foundation in Ghana after her sophomore year.

"He and I worked on a project looking at the decentralization of the Ghanaian Health Service and how that was impacted or related health outcomes in the different districts in Ghana," LeMasters said.
"It helped me think about how health care systems are set up and how societies are set up."

LeMasters then studied abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, to understand the genesis of international global health policies during her junior year, which then morphed into an independent study into the health disparities of the Roma people in Romania, funded by the John M. Evans Endowment for International Study. For her senior thesis, the economics and politics double major and poverty and human capability studies minor combined all her abroad experience, including her domestic work with the Navajo Nation, to look at health care institutions and divided societies. By the time she graduated, LeMasters cultivated a belief that all individuals should be allowed the opportunity for good health.

"I remember Professor Howard Pickett was teaching the poverty capstone course, and he looked at me, and he was like, 'But why? Why should I care?'" LeMasters said. "And I remember having to really arrive at myself, that I thought health care was a right people should have, and that good health was something that I just felt like everyone should get to experience. It's a systemic and ethical issue to not allow people the opportunity to have that. I can remember all these conversations with Tyler and all these conversations with Jon [Eastwood, my co-thesis adviser] kind of making me get there on my own."

That strong mentorship at W&L helps inform her teaching today in Colorado.

"Going to W&L made me a much better professor. I got to experience professors who really care about their students as people," she said. "Like [professor Dickovick] didn't focus on health outcomes; he was a political scientist in international development. But for him to sit with me multiple times to talk through how to square this interest in health equity with policies has helped me realize the importance of helping. It painted a picture for me of how to do that for students that I have and that I see."

Although LeMasters doesn't expect her graduate students to make a career of studying mass incarceration systems like she has, she hopes that her teachings at least inform their own research going forward.

"If you're going into public health, you do need to be aware that this is a population of over 2 million people on a given day - it's not small," she said. "If you're interested in cancer research, cancer rates are incredibly high in prison. So, when you're designing your study, you need to be sure you're not excluding people based on incarceration, which is the more standard and simpler thing to do. How can you be sure you're at least including a question on previous incarceration?"

"I hope that my work improves health equity for individuals impacted by mass incarceration," she added. "I also hope that this work helps people see the humanity in those around them, and sparks a curiosity to want to learn more and to explore what is often hidden in plain sight."

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