About Me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. I also have a secondary appointment in the Department of Implementation Science and am a core faculty member in the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity. My research applies community-engaged and mixed-method approaches to understand and address racial, ethnic and socioeconomic inequities in health and use of health services, with a focus on cancer prevention and control. Much of my current research investigates how novel implementation strategies can increase equitable receipt of lung cancer screening.
I also have expertise in understanding how medical mistrust affects health care use and cancer outcomes, especially in Black communities. As part of this research, I examine how the U.S. health care system has earned public mistrust, as well as approaches for increasing the trustworthiness of health care providers and systems. I also have methodological expertise in scale and measure development, which I have leveraged to develop and validate measures of patient trust in health care providers and teams. My overarching career goal is to lead interdisciplinary efforts that translate research results into trustworthy interventions and policies that build health equity.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a Research Associate at the American Institutes for Research, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. My research has been published in leading medical and public health journals, such as Social Science and Medicine, JAMA Network Open, Health Services Research, Annual Review of Public Health and CHEST.