My public health career began in Austin, TX, with LGBTQ+ teens who were thrown out of their homes after coming out to their parents. Then, the population shifted to drug-using and abusing young adults. After earning a Masters of Public Health from Columbia University, I lived in NYC for 20 years. While training teens in Brooklyn to become sexual health and substance use peer educators, I also noticed that the trainees never put down their phones.
So I returned to school for a doctorate of public health with a certification in interactive technology and pedagogy. This also began my health tech career as I explored how mobile tech might modify sexual risk-taking attitudes and behavior and provide a bridge to clinical services for Black and Latinx women.
Check out the health tech projects I’ve been a part of and have led below 👇🏽.
StudentBody, INC.
- Founder of startup to improve student health among first generation and low-income college students
- Networked with university Deans of Student Affairs and Diversity and Inclusion officers to address underlying root causes of poor student health
- Managed development team to promote stress management, and healthy lifestyle and relationship strategies that are evidence-based and culturally accessible
Center for Health Technology
- Authored weekly research and consumer health technology digest to 1500+ academic, industry, and government leaders
- Published 16 interviews with industry leaders such as Uché Blackstock, MD, Jo(seph) Amal Schneier, and Frank Rimalovski
Healthy CUNY App
- Built 2 college health apps across 5 college campuses on time and within budget
- Coordinated project development and evaluation between science, medical, and design teams
- Hired and supervised a team of 17 undergraduates and 7 graduate students
GURHL Code
- My mixed-methods dissertation evaluated gurhlcode.org, a site I designed and built informed by Black and Latinx women in NYC aged 18 to 24.
- Peer reviewed publication: Recruiting young women of color into a pilot RCT target sexual health: Lessons Learned and implications for applied health technology research
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
