The University at Albany COVID-19 and MHD in NYS Engaged Researchers (ERs) are a dynamic interdisciplinary research and collaboration ecosystem of more than 35 UAlbany researchers and professionals who are partnering with other Universities and community organizations directly impacted by COVID-19 to produce new knowledge for research and practice. The ERs, and UAlbany researchers more generally, are committed to understanding how systemic racism, embedded in the fabric and dynamics of our social, economic, and political structures, creates unequal conditions of well-being, disease and death. Their research, presented in part through this open access repository, illuminates the ways in which poverty, living conditions, discrimination, unequal access to healthcare, and justified distrust of the medical system have become life and death issues in the COVID-19 pandemic that will continue in the absence of acknowledgement, understanding, and reform. They are equally committed to the creation of interventions that can reduce or eliminate unequal impacts of social factors on disease.