An ongoing line of research involves assessing the level of health literacy among African Americans. A first study, examining the usefulness of the HLSI-SF scale and whether new media use can predict health literacy scores, was presented at the 2014 AEJMC conference in Montreal. This research was recently published in Digital Health.
Between 2013 and 2016 I served as the Research Facilitator for Health Disparities Research Community at Albany State University. This community was part of the NIH-funded RIMI project (Research Infrastructure in Minority Institutions) that ran from 2005 to 2016 at Albany State University. As Research Facilitator, I organized over 40 workshops to encourage research and interdisciplinary collaboration between on and off-campus organizations. I also coordinated grant-writing efforts, and created working relationships between faculty and community organizations.
In 2015, I was the recipient of the Presidential Research Awards Program for “Picture This”, a project that examined the role played by social media in altering people’s eating behaviors. Preliminary findings from this project were presented at the 2016 Health Disparities Conference organized at Albany State University, Georgia.