College of Nursing, PhD Student
I am a Clinical Nurse II in Emergency Medicine and practice as a certified Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner in the Piedmont North Carolina area. I returned to academia in fall of 2020 and am currently in my second year as a student in the PhD Division of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this role, I have had the recent opportunity to serve as a Research Assistant for the HARMONY study, which is a National Institute of Health funded intervention to reduce cardiometabolic risk in African American Women. This opportunity, as well as current training in Participatory Research, has evolved my research interests to further understand stress and coping mechanisms that are culturally relevant to African American Women. In my current training, I aim to further understand associations between biopsychosocial stress, biological aging, and unmitigated health disparities in this population. I am currently enrolled in this Current Issues in Participatory Research course, to begin my certificate training in Participatory Research. Following Participatory Research methods provides a framework for research with equitable community partnership, which is an essential piece in accomplishing my research mission. My goal is to incorporate these methodologies into my PhD training as tools for engaging communities with lived and historical experiences of race related stress and adverse historical traumas. This tool will guide further research in conceptualizing the experiences of intergenerational transmission of trauma in African American Women.