Cleopatra Abdou

Cleopatra Miriam Abdou-Kamperveen is an American psychologist, author, and professor, best known for her work on reproductive health, human flourishing, and longevity. Abdou is an assistant professor in the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC).

Abdou was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Clearwater, Florida. She and her four siblings, including an identical twin sister, are the children of Egyptian immigrants. Abdou lost her mother, Miriam Abdou, at birth due to labor and delivery complications and poor medical care, leading Abdou to commit early in life to making health and human flourishing her life’s work.

Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Abdou completed a postdoctoral fellowship in social epidemiology and population health as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. Abdou received her Ph.D. in social and health psychology, minoring in quantitative psychology, from UCLA in 2008. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami in 2000 with a degree in psychology and art.

Abdou has spent almost two decades conducting interdisciplinary research on how individuals, families, communities, and other groups manage to be healthy, happy, and successful against the odds. She is the author of nearly two dozen scientific articles and book chapters in the fields of psychology, public health, medicine, sociology, and aging. Abdou served as an associate editor for the Handbook of Minority Aging published by Springer in 2013.

Abdou developed the Culture and Social Identity Health Theory and the related conceptual framework, Aging Before Birth and Beyond. Abdou coined the term healthcare stereotype threat (HCST) and was the first to develop experimental methods for applying the social psychological theory of stereotype threat to the public health problem of health disparities, empirically demonstrating that healthcare stereotype threat is an overlooked psychosocial barrier to healthcare utilization and, thus, good health.

In 2014, Abdou conducted a study at the University of Southern California examining the role that stereotypes play in health disparities. The study identified and explained why women of color are less likely to use healthcare than White women and proposed some solutions. A paper about the study was published in the American Psychological Association journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology in July 2014.