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Assistant Professor
Ohio State University, College of Public Health, Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
I am a public health equity intervention scientist with expertise in: (1) Gathering information necessary to make healthcare and public health prevention protections accessible to populations that experience disparities due to the social and structural determinants of health; and (2) Developing and optimizing interventions to reduce disparities to be delivered in partnership with community organizations that serve traumatized, medically disconnected populations, including gender-based violence survivors and young people experiencing homelessness. The interventions I test often target modifiable environmental factors to improve service access or facilitate behavioral change. Informed by two decades of community work in violence prevention and crisis response, and trained as a feminist theorist, I also bring gender, culture, justice and community practice lenses to the study of health behavior and the promotion of health equity. I am the co-founder of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence, a 501(c)3 organization recognized by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention and the Office on Violence Against Women as Ohio’s coalition addressing sexual violence response and its prevention. I was awarded a K07 Career Development Grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop a smoking cessation intervention for youth experiencing homelessness using novel, optimization methodology (Multiphase Optimization STrategy). In addition, I served as the evaluator on an Office of Victims of Crime funded demonstration grant awarded to the Ohio Domestic Violence Network; this work focused on the creation, implementation and evaluation of the C.A.R.E. model, designed to increase advocacy organizations’ capacity to better meet the complex and often interconnected health concerns of domestic violence survivors—including brain injury. I hold a B.A. in Religion and Ethics, a M.A. in Women's Studies, and a PhD in Public Health, and am currently an Assistant Professor of Public Health at The Ohio State University in the Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion.
