Winter 2023-2024 CEMHD Newsletter
Spotlight on CEMHD’s Presidential Health Disparities Doctoral Fellows
We are excited to share the latest updates from current Fellows and alumni in this edition of the newsletter.
Briefly, funded through the NIMHD S-21 Health Disparities Endowment Grant and the Hearst Foundations, UAlbany’s Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities (CEMHD) offers a compensated fellowship for students who want to pursue a doctoral degree in any academic program that the University has to offer, while simultaneously receiving transdisciplinary training in health disparities.
The Presidential Fellowship in Research Training in Health Disparities Program at UAlbany is an exceptional opportunity for students from underserved, underrepresented communities who wish to continue their education and pursue a career that relates to health disparities.
The students awarded the fellowship become part of a learning community that is home to one of the leading research and training hubs for health disparities in the northeastern United States.
We currently have 11 fellows from multiple disciplines of which five are funded through the Hearst Foundations. In this issue, we want to highlight all our fellows, both current and graduated, and update our readers on their progress and their current projects related to health disparities.
We hope you enjoy the inspiring ways the Fellows continue to lead real change in their fields and communities and their growing dedication to eliminating health disparities within their disciplines.
Current Fellows
Guillermo entered the fellowship in 2019 and is in his final year of the doctoral program at UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice.
Guillermo’s general research interests include:
- Crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
- Organized criminal groups
- The structural and cultural causes and consequences of violence
- The effects of social structural factors on homicide
- Criminal justice policy (evidence-based practices)
- Urban criminology and sociology
- Drug policy
He is a quantitative researcher, thus far mainly using panel and time series models.
Guillermo aims to enter academia and become a leading criminologist (scholar) in crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Guillermo has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor in Department of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University, beginning in Fall 2024.
Justin entered the fellowship in 2020 and is a fourth-year student in the School of Criminal Justice.
Justin’s current research agenda is rooted in addressing racial disparities and inequities in two domains: the criminal legal system and health outcomes.
Using mixed methods, his work follows three paths:
- An experiment that utilizes a probability sample to clarify the relationship between language and framing and beliefs about criminal justice reform and abolition
- Improving local policy decision-making by examining the county-level association between homicide and life expectancy
- How black men perceive racial discrimination as they navigate healthcare treatment and organizations
Additionally, Justin teaches summer courses on inequality in the criminal legal system and qualitative methods for the Bard Prison Initiative.
With these various threads of inquiry and his diverse skill set, Justin is excited to continue his work in either an academic or private industry setting after graduation.
Jazmin entered the fellowship program in 2020 and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her sub-specialty is cultural medical anthropology.
Jazmin’s main research interests are reproductive health and healthcare disparities, as well as the circulation of health-related conspiracy beliefs.
Currently, she is conducting research for her dissertation, which looks at contraceptive access, attitudes and decision making among rural southern African American women in North Carolina.
Aside from her dissertation research, she recently worked on an interdisciplinary research study looking at vaccine behaviors and attitudes among reproductive age African American women in New York.
She is currently working on the manuscripts from this project with her faculty collaborators. With her work, her overall goal is to help achieve health and healthcare justice.
Rosie entered the fellowship program in 2020 and is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of Social Welfare. She is interested in how health policy enables and mitigates inequalities.
Her academic goals are to explore strategies to bring together health equity, and micro-level and macro-level social work practices and principles within the health policy-setting environment.
As part of the fellowship, Rosie collaborates with CEMHD’s Albany community health task force to effectuate goals.
Rosie specializes in the implementation of translational and interventional research in public health; advancing health equity; and the social and behavioral aspects of public health pedagogy and instruction.
She has also worked with both executive leadership and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians to develop health equity related medical education tools for over 12,000 internal medicine physicians and medical students with a specific focus on improving diversity along the medical professionalization pipeline.
Ruth entered the fellowship program in 2021 and is a third-year student in the doctoral program within the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies department.
Ruth’s research interests involve Latinx, migration, health, and labor studies as well as qualitative methods that amplify community-based concerns and creativity.
Through the collection of oral histories, her dissertation explores the experiences of Central American undocumented domestic workers from the 1970s to the present.
Ruth centers the voices of women participating in this labor market to provide significant insights into remaining questions regarding Latin American immigrants’ community formation, informal household labor, and migrant health inequities in the US.
For over a year, she collaborated with CEMHD’s Amsterdam Health Task Force to raise awareness about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation among Spanish-speaking local migrant farm workers and translated a pamphlet from English to Spanish to raise awareness across the increasing language barrier in healthcare.
She also worked with Capital District Latinos on a community theater project to increase health promotion through community engagement.
In 2023, she worked with the Division of Community Outreach and Medical Education of Albany Medical Center to develop a qualitative service-learning assessment focused on the impacts of student service-learning experiences.
Radhika entered the fellowship program in 2021 and is a third-year sociology doctoral student.
Her current research examines how acculturation contributes to health outcomes among racially minoritized groups. She is also interested in substance use and mental health issues.
Radhika recently published a paper in the journal Health Behavior Research which examined adolescent marijuana use behaviors across the life course and within different demographic groups.
She has worked with the New York chapter of the American College of Physicians’ (NYACP) pain management task force, on drug policy and treatment, which is especially important given the rising trends in opioid overdose and deaths since the pandemic.
With this task force, Radhika worked on updating the opioid training course required for all New York doctors to include data on racial disparities in drug overdose specific to New York State.
Additionally, Radhika provided recommendations to NYACP’s Health and Public Policy Committee on legislation concerning opioid overdose prevention in NYS K-12 schools.
She drafted a legislative memo on behalf of NYACP, which included practical suggestions about how schools and families can work together in opioid overdose prevention and intervention.
Radhika’s goal is to translate her research into actionable steps by informing proposed policy and educational training among the health-care workforce.
Esperanza joined the PhD program in the Biological Sciences Department and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.
She has been active in organizations focused on supporting BIPOC students in STEM and established a chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.
Esperanza’s awareness of these disparities, academically and personally, has fueled her pursuit of a PhD in hopes of contributing meaningful findings that may lead to more effective treatments.
Her research interests include investigating the development and applications of stem cells and how molecular signaling changes can lead to systemic diseases. Currently, Esperanza’s research focuses on the process of protein synthesis process known as translation.
Earlier this year, she developed a new assay using a luciferase-encoding RNA. Last fall, Esperanza, with her advisor and collaborators, continued expanding this project by incorporating modifications in their luciferase-encoding RNA.
In the upcoming year, the team is preparing a manuscript with their findings for publication. They have also begun a secondary project assembling a fluorescent coding construct to determine the efficiency of sequences that may drive non-canonical translational.
One of her goals is to strengthen the communication between biomedical researchers and BIPOC communities.
Kennedi entered the PhD program in the Biological Sciences Department and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.
Her research focuses on understanding senescence as a related factor contributing to salivary gland dysfunction and develop/engineer exosomes with miRNAs to limit the severity of disease.
Kennedi’s goals are to define contributing factors to salivary gland dysfunction and understand health disparities aspect of head and neck cancer patients.
She is currently working on in vitro and mouse models to produce preliminary data of aging and senescence to receive more funding and for future presentations.
She gave a presentation at the RNA Institute Bioinformatics program about understanding the biological genes in African American women’s ancestry versus Caucasian women’s ancestry among cases of aggressive breast cancer and understanding the differences between the two groups of women.
Renae entered the PhD program in Biological Sciences at the School of Public Health and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.
Renae is a rising black dentist-scientist who is passionate about increasing health opportunities for all.
Her work entails elucidating mechanisms that drive Sjogren's Disease — the second most prevalent autoimmune disease in the United States, which affects women more than men and American Indians more than African Americans and European Americans.
In this past year, Renae has focused on providing a forum for fellow graduate students in the School of Public Health who identified as BILPOC to be mentored by their peers.
They discussed topics like navigating their graduate career as a BILPOC and the importance of investing in your village for career development. Renae benefited as she sought to benefit others.
Jacob entered the fellowship program in Fall 2023, as a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology.
Over the last year, Jacob has been deeply engaged in researching health disparities in predominantly minority neighborhoods, with a specific focus on the Bronx, NY.
He is committed to understanding and addressing the complex social and economic factors that contribute to unequal health outcomes in these communities.
Together with Dr. Ruchs-Ahidiana, Jacob is currently assisting with a publication that aims to measure and analyze racialized labor markets.
Their goal is to investigate the existence of occupational segregation and understand the dynamics of job selection across different racial and ethnic groups.
This research is particularly important in highlighting how systemic inequalities in employment contribute to broader health disparities.
In addition to his academic research, he has expanded his focus this year to include community-oriented projects.
He aims to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world application, ensuring that his work contributes to tangible improvements in the lives of people in these communities.
He is excited to continue exploring new and constructive ways to make a positive impact on the lives of those affected by health disparities.
Chrismery entered the fellowship program in 2023 and is a third-year DrPH student in the School of Public Health.
She has held positions conducting domestic violence and sexual assault prevention, youth substance use prevention, gambling prevention and addressing health disparities among vulnerable and marginalized populations.
In addition to her studies at UAlbany, she co-chairs the Massachusetts Public Health Association’s Racial Equity and Health committee and belongs to a historically Black sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho.
Her research interests include minority health disparities, marginalized communities, and translational research. Her goals are to decrease gaps in life expectancy rates through community engagement and advocacy efforts.
Currently, Chrismery is collaborating on a project spearheaded by the Albany Medical Center piloting interventions that reduce abuse of opioids through the emergency department.
Ms. Gonzalez’s goal is to be at decision-making tables and ensure all policies, practices, and resources are carried out in equitable manners that address the neglected communities of color experience.
Fellowship Alumni
Dr. Cabrera Tineo entered the fellowship program in 2017 as a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology and successfully defended her dissertation in 2022.
She is now a counseling psychologist currently completing a trauma-focused psychology postdoctoral fellowship at Beacon Group Therapy in Boston, MA.
At the private clinic, she provides outpatient psychotherapy via telehealth for young adults presenting with mild to moderate psychopathology, substance use, physical health concerns and complex trauma histories.
Concurrently, Dr. Cabrera-Tineo is also an active researcher with several peer-reviewed publications and numerous presentations on issues regarding multiculturalism, mental health, health risk behaviors among emerging adults and marginalized populations, but not exclusively.
She plans to continue working as a scientist-practitioner to address issues around multiculturalism and health disparities.
Dr. Kalu entered the fellowship program in 2018 as a doctoral student in Sociology and received her degree in 2023.
Dr. Kalu’s research examines the sociology of stratification, the health consequences of social and demographic shifts relating to minority children and women, and utilizing critical frameworks as an asset-based approach to empower underserved populations.
Her focus deals with pressing issues like housing insecurity, limited healthcare access, and scarce educational resources. Her dissertation focused on gentrification and public education outcomes.
This work serves as a turning point, connecting her interest in social dynamics with the issues of social determinants of health, specifically education.
Dr. Kalu’s research examined a Southern U.S. community to assess the multi-level effects of individual school attributes, neighborhood socioeconomic changes, and overarching district demographics and policies to understand the impact of urban transformation on primary school educational outcomes.
Currently, Dr. Kalu is a Community Violence Prevention Postdoctoral Fellow at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; she is advancing research on hospital-based and community-focused programming for violence prevention.
Dr. Kalu has keen interest in methodological issues within social determinants of health research from a sociological lens.
Dr. Myo entered the fellowship program in 2017 as a doctoral student in the School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and successfully defended her DrPh dissertation in 2022.
Dr. Myo’s dedication to public health originates from her home country of Myanmar (Burma), particularly in addressing health equity and disparity.
She is now a Program Research Specialist at the New York State Department of Health’s Center for Community Health, where she focuses on women’s cancer research, specifically breast and cervical cancer.
In addition to research, Dr. Myo is deeply involved in community engagement and promoting the well-being of underserved diverse communities, especially the Burmese community in New York State’s Capital region.
As the Myanmar Multiethnic Sociocultural Association president, Dr. Myo collaborates with various agencies, such as the International Center of the Capital Region and the Northeast New York Coalition for Occupational Safety & Health.
Their collective efforts aim to promote occupational health and safety for underprivileged workers in the Burmese community.
Addressing health disparity issues in the Capital Region, she was acknowledged alongside other Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders by New York State Governor Hochul in 2023.
Dr. Myo’s unwavering commitment to meaningful contributions within and outside her research focus demonstrates a comprehensive dedication to societal well-being.
Dr. Noel entered the PhD program in the School of Criminal Justice and the fellowship program in Fall 2016. In 2020, she received her PhD in Criminal Justice.
Currently, Dr. Noel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University.
Prior to her appointment at Temple University, she served as a graduate student researcher for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, and as a postdoctoral fellow at American University in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology.
As a criminologist, Dr. Noel’s work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, transitions to adulthood and parental incarceration.
Utilizing qualitative research methods, her ongoing research examines parental incarceration among emerging adults and strength-based perspectives within incarcerated families.
Her mission is to reduce racial and health disparities among communities of color. She uses her educational platform to provide a voice for those who are marginalized.
Dr. Lawrence entered the fellowship program in 2016 as a doctoral student in the School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He received his DrPh in 2020.
His research focuses on understanding how the social environment contributes to disparities in disease risk and mortality among structurally marginalized populations.
He seeks to understand the relationship between the neighborhood environment and health — specifically how residential area circumstances in which individuals are born, grow, live, work and age affect their health and quality of life.
Currently, Dr. Lawrence is investigating the contributions of racial residential segregation, psychosocial stressors and barriers to quality medical care to exacerbating cancer disparities and premature mortality.
His research also examines national trends in leading causes of death by race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
Dr. Lawrence also serves as the Co-Chair of the Social and Structural Determinates of Health Working Group of the Connect for Cancer Prevention Study.
The Connect for Cancer Prevention Cohort Study is a new prospective cohort of 200,000 adults in the United States designed to further investigate the etiology of cancer and its outcomes.
In this role, he leads identifying measures to include in the study related to social inequalities and structural racism.
Dr. Reid entered the fellowship program in 2016 as a doctoral student in the School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Management and was awarded her DrPh degree in 2019.
Currently, she is Assistant Professor and Director of Public Health Programs at the University of St. Joseph (USJ). Prior to joining USJ, she was a visiting assistant professor at Mercy College in New York.
As a mixed-method health equity researcher, Dr. Reid’s research interests primarily focus on examining children's health outcomes and health disparities within the Black subpopulation, specifically the US Afro-Caribbean populations.
Additionally, she is deeply interested in exploring the role of ethnic identity in moderating health practices and outcomes.
As a public health practitioner, Dr. Reid supports youth-based organizations in Hartford, CT, by providing technical support in program development, grant writing and evaluation.
She is actively involved in a study exploring the perceptions, health-seeking behaviors and approaches to mental health care among Afro-Caribbean women in the United States.
Dr. Roberson-Miranda entered the doctoral program in Counseling Psychology and the fellowship program in 2017 and received her degree in 2022.
Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Counseling Psychology graduate program.
She has provided mental health treatment to children and adults in various settings, including jails, outpatient clinics and hospitals.
She began engaging in research focused on racism and mental health disparities during her doctoral program and continued this work through her post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Health Equity Research at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Dr. Roberson-Miranda’s current research focuses on:
- Stress reactions stemming from racial discrimination
- Resilience and protective factors within communities of Color
- Factors which promote antiracist activism
She received the NIH LRP grant — a program established by Congress and designed to recruit and retain highly qualified health professionals into biomedical or biobehavioral research careers — through which she is conducting an anti-stigma intervention with Black Americans in New York City.
Dr. Roberson-Miranda is on the editorial board for Psychiatric Quarterly, and in January 2024 will join the editorial board for The Counseling Psychologist.
Dr. Seward entered the fellowship program and the doctoral program in Health Policy Management and Behavior at the School of Public Health in 2018, receiving her DrPH degree in 2022.
She currently serves as Assistant Professor in Public Health and Preventive Medicine and Director of Community Engaged Learning at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY.
Dr. Seward utilizes her roles within the university to advance health equity by training the next generation of health care providers.
Dr. Seward has focused on participatory action research to ensure that community health interventions and programs are based on the needs and/or assets of the community.
Through shared decision making, she ensures community members have a voice in the design and implementation of community-based research, interventions, and programs.
As a community health advocate, Dr. Seward has developed strategic approaches that center social justice and racial equity to decrease the disparities in Black maternal and child health.
Using community engagement as a vehicle for systemic change, she builds interdisciplinary, collaborative partnerships that are sensitive to diverse perspectives and population priorities.
Dr. Seward also has several professional affiliations where she donates her time including serving as:
- Vice-Chair of the board of directors for the Central New York Lyme and Tickborne Disease Alliance
- Member of the Blueprint 15 board of directors
- Member of the Onondaga County Health Advisory Counci
- Member of the Community Action Network (CAN) for the Syracuse Healthy Start initiative