Department of Health Behavior, Gillings School of Global Public Health
Dr. Lightfoot is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She is committed to partnering with communities to address identified concerns and collaborating with them in each stage of the research process. She also serves as Director of the Community Engagement and Training Cores at UNC’s Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Co-Director of Community and Stakeholder Engagement at the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute. In these roles she lends participatory research methodological expertise and provides technical assistance to build and strengthen community-academic partnerships. She uses the community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach throughout her research with a particular focus on addressing adolescent well-being through a racial equity lens. She also integrates arts-based approaches into her research and practice, including the photovoice research methodology. For GCPR, Dr. Lightfoot co-teaches the introductory course “Current Issues in Participatory Research” and the elective seminar, HBEH 710, “Community Capacity, Competence, and Power: Community-Based Participatory Research and Photovoice.”