Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is professor of clinical sociomedical sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, and professor of clinical psychiatry, College of Physicians and Surgeons, at Columbia University. Trained at Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University, she has conducted research on AIDS and other epidemics of poor communities and is interested in the links between the environment and mental health. Her research examines the mental health effects of environmental processes such as violence, segregation, and urban renewal. She has published numerous articles and four books including Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (2004), The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place (1999), and coauthored Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents: Institutional Distributed Cognition, Racial Policy and Public Health in the United States (2008) and Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People's Power (2008). Her title Urban Alchemy was published in 2013 by New Village Press.

Read about howa sense of history and community tugged at the heart of Mindy Fullilove and pulled her back to the Jersey home she'd forsaken in How I Learned to Love My Hometown by Mindy Fullilove and Molly Rose Kaufman featured in YES! Magazine's Summer 2012 issue.