A candidate for the Behavioral Health position is 

a Professor of Public Health Education and the Provost Fellow for Faculty Development at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The candidate received their doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University and completed their bachelor’s degree at the New School for Social Research. The candidate has 30 years of experience in the development and evaluation of school and community-based health promotion programs, with expertise in implementation science and longitudinal research methodology. The candidate was a member of the team that developed and evaluated the Botvin Life Skills Training program, which is now one of the top research-based prevention programs in the US and is used in 39 countries across the world. Her current research agenda covers substance use, reproductive health, adolescent health, and health inequities. The candidate's work focuses on service provision and coordination of care for pregnant and parenting people who use drugs as well as the development of stigma reduction programs to increase care engagement. The candidate applies an intersectional and critical lens to this work and primarily employs a combination of community-engaged, arts-based, and more traditional qualitative methodologies.

Research Talk:  "Increasing Care Engagement among Pregnant and Parenting People Who Use Drugs."

Pregnant and parenting people who use drugs (PPPWUD) are less likely to receive critical healthcare and social services. Gender-responsive and trauma-informed care, coordinated across agencies and systems and focused on the parent-infant dyad, is critical to achieving positive outcomes for both parent and child. While there are well-established, evidence-based practices for treating parent-infant dyads affected by substance use, implementation of these practices can face a variety of challenges, including a lack of resources and difficulty coordinating across multiple complex adaptive systems. These challenges are exacerbated by the stigmatization of PPPWUD as well as biases directed towards harm reduction practices. This presentation will provide an overview of the two related arms of my current research agenda: advancing best practices in care and reducing stigma related to care. Using findings from the literature and a series of community-engaged studies I’ve conducted over the past 10 years; I will argue for the need to develop and implement stigma reduction interventions for perinatal substance use service delivery to improve engagement and retention in care. The presentation will end with my current efforts and plans to achieve these goals.