Dr. Beyer focuses on the intersection of health, place, and social justice. Her research passion is to identify environmental and systematic causes of health disparities, and to apply a translational research framework, including community engaged research, to move research findings into program and policy interventions to close the gaps. Her current research focuses on the impacts of neighborhood environmental characteristics such as residential racial segregation and green space on cancer outcomes, particularly through pathways that include stress, time spent outdoors, social interaction, and food and physical activity behaviors.

Dr. Beyer's current project is focused on the contemporary problems of institutional racism and residential racial segregation, and investigates whether these social structures contribute to the magnitude of racial and ethnic breast cancer survival disparities. The project uses a community engaged research framework that draws upon existing partnerships with community organizations in Milwaukee, WI, which often tops the list of America's most segregated cities. Using a mixed methods approach, the interdisciplinary research team is working to (1) construct and examine new and existing metrics of institutional racism and segregation for the largest US metropolitan areas, (2) determine whether measures of institutional racism and segregation are related to breast cancer survival disparities and whether relationships are mediated by local stressors, social resources, or opportunities, and (3) explore the ways in which Black and Hispanic breast cancer survivors in the Milwaukee, WI metropolitan area navigate cancer survivorship in the context of segregation.

Dr. Beyer became interested in social justice as a child. She reveled in her father's story of meeting Stokely Carmichael, used class assignments to learn about the civil rights movement, and lived her life to the soundtrack of her parents' folk protest music. She soon discovered that the injustices driving the protest, music, and advocacy in these earlier years had not disappeared over time, but had in some cases changed in form. Where there previously had been Jim Crow laws, there arose mass incarceration. Where there had previously been residential racial segregation, there was… still, residential racial segregation. Her early study of public health confirmed that these social injustices translated strongly into racial and socioeconomic health disparities, and these disparities became the focus of her research.