Dr Helena Mendes Constante (she/her)

Department of Sociological Studies

Research Associate

image of Helena Mendes Constante
Profile picture of image of Helena Mendes Constante
H.M.Constante@sheffield.ac.uk
The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Helena Mendes Constante
Department of Sociological Studies
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
Profile

Helena’s research interest has been in mapping inequities in health and healthcare outcomes. She has recently focused her work on ways to dismantle structural oppression by studying how intersecting forms of marginalisation affect intersectional groups.

She joined the Department as a Research Associate in 2023 to work on the project “Storying Life Courses for Intersectional Inclusion: Ethnicity and Wellbeing Across Time and Place” funded under the ESRC’s Inclusive Ageing programme (PI: Professor Majela Kilkey).

Helena holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from University College London (UCL, 2019) and an MSc in Public Health from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC/Brazil, 2014). After her PhD, she was awarded two consecutive Fellowships funded by the two main research funders in Brazil (CAPES and CNPq). The projects she wrote aimed to measure intersectional inequities in health services using a multilevel approach to understand injustices in the care context.

She also worked for the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ/Brazil) as a Data Analyst for two years, and in three UCL Departments (Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Political Science Department, and Institute of Neurology) as a PGTA teaching statistics to undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Research interests

Inequities in health and healthcare

Helena is interested in understanding racial and ethnic inequities in health and healthcare outcomes. While Brazil, as a country, categorised its population according to racial groups, she wrote a project entitled ‘Racial inequalities in health and dental service utilisation: exploring the role of lifestyle and perceived discrimination among a sample of Brazilian population’ and was granted a Research Fellowship by the Ministry of Education in Brazil - CAPES.

Using an intersectionality approach to social and health outcomes

Helena has a particular interest in mapping injustices in social and health outcomes to drive policies to improve the lives of people lying at the intersection of multiple axes of inequality. Mainly focusing on interlocking systems of oppression that operate from macro- to micro-levels of contemporary societies. She wrote a project entitled ‘Inequity, intersectionality and utilisation of health services: mapping the margins in a representative sample of Brazil’ and was granted a Research Fellowship by one of the country’s biggest research funders - CNPq.

Mapping intersectional life course of inclusion/exclusion and wellbeing

Helena is also interested in understanding how inclusion and wellbeing are distributed across the intersections of social characteristics and how contextual and life course characteristics may play a role in this relationship. She is currently part of an interdisciplinary team working on a project funded under the ESRC’s Inclusive Ageing programme. The project`s PI is Professor Majella Kilkey, and Helena is part of the quantitative team working alongside Dr Daniel Holman, Professor Matthew Bennett, and Professor Mark Green (University of Liverpool).

Publications

Journal articles

Conference proceedings papers