Summary: New York City is home to some of the most medically underserved and research-avoidant communities in the country — not because people there don't care about health, but because research has rarely shown up for them consistently, honestly, or in a language they speak. Nationally, non-Hispanic white participants still make up roughly three-quarters of clinical trial enrollment while representing a shrinking share of the population, and in a city where nearly half of re

Summary Informed consent is supposed to be the moment a research participant fully understands what they're agreeing to. In practice, it rarely works that way. Fewer than 10% of participants report reading an entire consent form before signing it,⁵ and in controlled comprehension tests, only 28% of participants could correctly answer basic questions about what they'd just consented to.⁵ The gap is widest for the communities research is most supposed to serve: people with lowe

Summary Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. incarcerated population — up more than sevenfold since 1980, even as overall crime has fallen. Roughly 70% of incarcerated women meet clinical criteria for a substance use disorder, and formerly incarcerated women are more likely than formerly incarcerated men to become homeless after release. In New York, women make up a small share of the state prison population (about 4%) but face a reentry system built almost entir