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In Columbia, South Carolina I was met with questions of exclusivity while walking through the capital’s art museum. The space is vast and beautiful, but intimidating and inaccessible. In order to better understand community needs and how the public institute might be used, I led a pilot research study.

I noticed a gap in the social services market after evaluating the results. Previous research established that art and music can benefit persons in the early stages of dementia and moderate cognitive impairment; with this basis, I restricted my emphasis to persons living with Alzheimer's and dementia and investigated how to thoughtfully design a program.

At the Columbia Museum of Art (CMA), I co-founded Creative Age Initiative, an Alzheimer's and dementia program. I spearheaded this program with local community groups to provide educational classes, legal assistance, social engagement, and other types of workshops to various caregivers and their care partners at CMA—all designed to encourage and empower the caregiver, as well as provide respite to the caregiver and their care partner. I was able to pinpoint the problem of exclusivity, concentrate on people living with Alzheimer's and dementia, and collaborate with the local community to launch the Creative Age Initiative.

Thank you to the community for trusting me with this project. The project is currently a combined effort between the Palmetto Health Hospital, Columbia Museum of Art, Leeza’s Care Connections, and University of South Carolina.

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I was confronted with health and education inquiries at the county-level that could not be answered using readily available federal or state statistics.

As a result, my colleague and I created a comprehensive, contextual dataset to solve this problem for the nation. We constructed a database in Stata that includes county-level indicators of school quality, school segregation, and academic achievement. To construct a user-friendly database (School Quality Indicators Database, SQID), we took data from all public primary and secondary schools in the United States, aggregated the data to the county level, and linked the county-level data to County Health Rankings. This is the first county-level health indicator database in the United States to include all primary and secondary schools.

Our team was able to gain a better understanding of the connection between county-level population health outcomes and academic success, school quality, and school segregation. We encountered the issue of insufficient data, honed down on a specific solution, and produced an innovative dataset that is available to scholars around the nation.

County Health Rankings Research Grant, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (UWPHI) are collaborators on the County Health Rankings Research Grant program to mobilize local communities, national partners, and leaders across multiple sectors to improve health and increase health equity

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My team and I identified a gap in research, focused on a specific issue within the larger context, and created an innovative lab where we conducted groundbreaking research to create actionable steps to solve the nation’s health inequities.

With my research team, we found a gap in understanding the variation of experiences of African American children and families across time. We then created the first NSF-funded lab in the southeast that focused specifically on African American children and their families: The Strength, Assets, and Resilience Lab (StAR Lab). The research conducted at StAR explores the positive individual and collective contributions of families, schools, and communities across different life trajectories for Black Americans. As a team we were able to identify a lack of research, focus on the specific issue within the larger context, and create an innovative lab where we found answers to our research questions to improve public policies.

National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Grant with StAR Lab (formally African American Youth Lab) for Fathers and Mothers in the Lives of Youth (F.A.M.I.L.Y) project, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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