2023 Pilot Projects

Dr. Lucinda Canty and Dr. Favorite Iradukunda (Nursing), Dr. Lindiwe Sibeko, SPHHS (Nutrition), and Dr. Shannon Roberts (Engineering) are collaborating on a project entitled Black Maternal Mobility in Western Massachusetts: The experience of Transportation among Black Pregnant Women. Black women are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity compared to other women in the United States, and there is a gap in knowledge about how transportation influences the experience of care during pregnancy that this project aims to fill.

William Bazile ’24 and Madison Perry ’24 from the College of Engineering and Doctoral candidate Ruth Appiah-Kubi from SPHHS will be using mixed methods (interviews, ride-alongs, and secondary data analysis) to better understand the transportation needs of Black women in Western Mass. and to lay the foundation for future studies. The study is ongoing, and the end goal is to use this information in future grant proposals focused on developing interventions and suggesting solutions to transportation issues as it relates to accessing maternal healthcare facilities for Black pregnant women. The project is jointly funded by the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation and the Institute of Diversity Sciences.

Dr. Yossi Chait (Engineering) and Dr. Jeungok Choi’s (Nursing) project, Individualized Blood Pressure Management in the Community, aims to introduce a novel blood pressure management device and examine the prevalence of hypertension in Springfield, MA and the surrounding area. Working at the Baystate High Street Health Center with local clinicians, Dr. Michael Germain, MD, and Baystate Health’s Dr. Paul Pirraglia, MD, the team will collect data from the predominantly underserved population that the Baystate Health Center serves. Student researchers were Sophia Tsekov ’24, Leia Payano ’24, Jesus Tejeda ’24, and Alexandria Galicki ’25 from the College of Engineering.

The team points out that “Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have significantly lower rates of BP [blood pressure] control than White Americans; these disparities are likely due to systemic racial discrimination, socioeconomic inequality, and unequal access to healthcare services.”

Introducing an innovative blood pressure management approach, the team’s work addresses transportation as a factor in hypertension (if people can’t get to places where treatment is offered, regardless of how leading-edge that treatment is, it becomes ineffective). This ongoing project is helping to strengthen and formalize the Baystate UMass relationship and streamline future research.

Dr. Muge Capan (Engineering), Dr. Joohyun Chung (Nursing), and Dr. Amanda Paluch’s (SPHHS Kinesiology) project, An Exploratory Study to Identify Multi-Level Factors of Physical Health and Well-Being in the Nursing, aims to categorize individual and social factors related to barriers to the development of healthy habits including Physical Activity (PA) to develop a sustainable intervention program.

Assisting are several students including doctoral candidate Yukti Kathuria and undergraduate student Lily Bigelow ‘25, from the College of Engineering, Lingsong Kong, doctoral candidate from the SPHHS Kinesiology department and Emefa Aduwudu, College of Nursing doctoral candidate.

The team notes that “nurses work in an environment that involves physically demanding tasks, irregular sleep patterns, and emotionally taxing situations. Although they spend much of their day promoting the health of their patients, they have a high prevalence of poor health behaviors, poor cardiovascular health, obesity, and diabetes.”

The team collected data between September and October 2023 from 163 participants, with the study population including students currently enrolled in a nursing degree program at UMass Amherst. They determined that social support and education as well as access to healthcare technology are effective means of reducing barriers to PA and introduces the novel concept of nursing students as a potential early intervention population for the promotion of PA. Research is ongoing and the team continues to examine the development of sustainable health interventions for nurses.