Welcome to Dr. Ursula Running Bear!

Ursula Running Bear, M.A., Ph.D., has joined the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences!

Dr. Running Bear is an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe who completed a Ph.D. in clinical science from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Arizona. Her family moved to Denver, Colo., during relocation. She grew up in Denver but also spent many years in rural Colorado. Dr. Running Bear’s early career focused on providing direct services to American Indians in Denver. She then worked for the U.S. Census Bureau as a Tribal Partnership Specialist where she worked with over 30 tribal governments to plan, organize data collection, and work on pre-data collection activities. She spent seventeen years at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health, where her work focused primarily on research and evaluation with American Indian and Alaska Native people across the nation on a variety of topics. Dr. Running Bear’s interests include American Indian Health, substance use disorders, alcohol detoxification, and the impacts of American Indian boarding school attendance on health. She enthusiastically joins the MPH program at UND.