Background:
I am an intervention scientist dedicated to conducting the scientific work needed to improve health and reduce disparities for those impacted by violence in the context of trauma—most notably women and children exposed to domestic violence and homelessness. In the United States, one in three women will experience domestic violence and over one million youth are homeless. An interconnected web of comorbid conditions are concentrated within these populations, including undiagnosed head injury, disability from mental health, alcohol, tobacco, and other substance use and exposure to forced or coerced sexual activity. My work focuses on building and optimizing behavioral interventions for these populations recognizing the chaotic circumstances in which they live and are trying to recover, heal, and make behavioral change. As the leading cause of premature morbidity and mortality, and due to its high prevalence within these populations, I have increasingly focused my scholarship on understanding smoking behavior and cessation. Informed by nearly 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 (2017-2022) from the National Cancer Institute to develop a smoking cessation intervention for homeless youth using novel, optimization methodology (Multiphase Optimization STrategy). In addition, I serve as an evaluator on an Office of Victims of Crime funded demonstration grant (2016-2019) awarded to the Ohio Domestic Violence Network; this work focuses 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, mental health, trauma and substance use.
