Research
The opportunity for children's health begins in families, schools, communities, and other salient contexts.
My doctoral training in Human Development and Family Sciences has prepared me to consider children’s individual assets and diatheses, as well as the complex systems in which they are embedded, as they relate to health and health equity.
Given the critical importance of children’s contexts for their development, the bulk of my work to date has focused on children's experiences within these important contexts. At the same time, our experiences within our contexts are impacted by our social positions in the world. Interpersonal stigma and systemic oppression operate to create systems that privilege and disadvantage individuals with different social positions. Youth with certain marginalized social positions, such as high body weight, LGBTQ+ identities, or multiple intersecting marginalized social positions, may be at disproportionate risk for poor health outcomes due to stigma.
My work uses mixed methodologies and an intersectional perspective to better understand social determinants of health and health disparities among marginalized children, along two broad research lines:
(1) Weight stigma in families (in collaboration with Dr. Rebecca Puhl at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health)
(2) Experienced and internalized stigma among LGBTQ+ youth (in collaboration with Dr. Marla Eisenberg on her NIH-funded Protection at the Intersections for Queer Teens of Color (PIQTOC) Study, and Dr. Eva Lefkowitz as part of the Developmental Approaches to Sexual Health (DASH) Lab)
Given the critical importance of children’s contexts for their development, the bulk of my work to date has focused on children's experiences within these important contexts. At the same time, our experiences within our contexts are impacted by our social positions in the world. Interpersonal stigma and systemic oppression operate to create systems that privilege and disadvantage individuals with different social positions. Youth with certain marginalized social positions, such as high body weight, LGBTQ+ identities, or multiple intersecting marginalized social positions, may be at disproportionate risk for poor health outcomes due to stigma.
My work uses mixed methodologies and an intersectional perspective to better understand social determinants of health and health disparities among marginalized children, along two broad research lines:
(1) Weight stigma in families (in collaboration with Dr. Rebecca Puhl at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health)
(2) Experienced and internalized stigma among LGBTQ+ youth (in collaboration with Dr. Marla Eisenberg on her NIH-funded Protection at the Intersections for Queer Teens of Color (PIQTOC) Study, and Dr. Eva Lefkowitz as part of the Developmental Approaches to Sexual Health (DASH) Lab)
Across these lines of research, my underlying aim is to identify environmental assets to foster and risk factors to dismantle in youth’s contexts, in order to make the opportunity for health accessible to all children.
