CHE hires three new faculty
As part of the Amherst 250 plan, the Community Health Education program was granted authorization to conduct searchers for two new positions last year, one in community-based participatory research and health disparities, and the other in Women’s Health. We are delighted to announce that we are able to hire three new faculty as a results of these search processes. A brief profile of the new faculty appears below.
Lisa Wexler: Dr. Lisa Wexler graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2005, with a PhD in Work, Community and Family Education. For her dissertation research, she did some extremely cool community-based participatory research on the loss of cultural identity in relation to suicide among native Alaskan youth. Her work is based on a highly sophisticated theoretical framework, drawing on narrative analysis and critical social science, and yet, she has also demonstrated a significant commitment to resolving health disparities in underserved populations, continuing her work with these native Alaskan villages in implementing a suicide prevention program to this day. She already has a number of publications on suicide in young people, and we are delighted to have her join us in bringing her many skills and talents to our program and the people of western Massachusetts and New England. Dr. Wexler will be teaching our Doctoral Seminar this semester, and Program Planning in the Spring.
Tameka Gillum: Dr. Tameka Gillum has a PhD in Community Psychology, with a minor in the sociology of gender and race, from Michigan State University in 2004, and she has just completed a two-year post-doc research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and their Urban Health Institute. Her primary research interest is intimate partner violence, and in particular, the disproportionate rates of IPV among women of color, and the development of culturally-specific interventions tailored to African-American women. As part of her dissertation research, she developed and validated of her own “Perceptions of African-Americans” scale, which has subsequently been used in other research projects. She was extraordinarily productive while at Hopkins, producing a large number of publications, in addition to initiating a CDC-funded telephone intervention to promote various safety measures for women who have been battered, work with which she continues to be involved. She has taught courses on the Psychology of Women, Field Research Methods, and Psychological Interventions. She will be co-teaching everybody’s favorite course, 601, Social & Behavioral Theory in Public Health, with Prof. Idali Torres this term, and taking over full reins for the course in the Spring.
Aline Gubrium: Dr. Aline Gubrium has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida, completed in 2005. She then spent a year as an Assistant Professor in Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College, where she helped to develop a new concentration Women’s Health there. Her dissertation research focused on the gender socialization processes of rural poor African-American women growing up in the South, and she too has already published a number of articles based on her study. Dr. Gubrium uses a totally cool methodology, utilizing narrative analysis to gain insight into the ways that people make sense of their lives and construct their self-understanding, examining how people draw on meta-narratives available in their socio-cultural milieu. Her approach to research has taken her into a number of different women’s health issues, including the use of crack cocaine, being a mother and crack cocaine user, HIV/AIDS, reproductive health & contraception, teen pregnancy, coping with disabilities, and violence against women. We are especially looking forward to working with her on matters of cross-cultural influences that affect women’s health decision-making. Dr. Gubrium is teaching a course on Women’s Health this semester and a class on Culture, Health & Society in the Spring.
