Rachel

 

Doctoral Student in Health Behavior and Health Education

 

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Research

Vision

Utilizing the non-profit organization I have founded, Engaging Abilities, I anticipate working in patient advocacy, community outreach, research, and physician and community education to benefit disability and LGBT communities. I plan to continue working throughout my life in the service of underprivileged and impoverished  communities.

I believe that effective clinical practice should be based in reliable, well-designed research, and I hope to improve clinical practices for pediatric chronic illness and developmental disability intervention management through clinical research. My long term career goals include developing and distributing a toolkit for physicians to facilitate effective, patient-centered intervention planning for chronic illness and working to integrate improved consideration of sociocultural factors into successful clinical practice via research based methodology. I believe this can happen via a clinical research paradigm that facilitates the collection of research quality biomedical and sociocultural data by clinicians in a way that improves the clinical experience for patients, health care providers, and staff.

These issues  are significant because there has been little effort to quantify the factors influencing intervention selection among disability populations. Currently health care providers lack tools to assist with planning for the common social, behavioral, and academic/employment issues that affect successful management of chronic illness and disability. Assisting clinicians in proactively planning for social and personal issues that impact intervention implementation is crucial to the long term successful management of a disability. Social, cultural and personal barriers can impede intervention management and decrease treatment adherence.

I am also interested in developing programs to address common barriers to success. The prevention of depression and other mental illnesses among people with disabilities, as well as the prevention of social isolation, are two such areas that I would like to do further work on. Depression and negative social outcomes are common in people with disabilities, and are associated with other negative outcomes. Programs that promote social justice for people with disabilities may help to prevent this. Allies for Ability, a program I am currently working on, addresses through education and community organizing, the need for visible allies to disability communities to improve the social climate. I also hope to continue developing Allies for Ability, and to apply this program to within the healthcare system.

Experiences

Clinical Toolkit for Intervention Planning in Childhood Chronic Disease

Allies for Ability: A Process for Visibility Building for Disability Communities

The Autlook Project: Creating Ability Friendly Digital and Physical Spaces

Karlsberger Healthcare Consulting Research Analysis

Healthy Minds Study: Mental Health among College and University Students

First Words Project

The Toddler Project: Development of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule Toddler Revision

Attention Study: Quantifying Social Behavior

Cultural Perceptions of the Etiology of Childhood Disability and Relationship to Treatment in the United States and West Africa

Issues in Women’s Citizenship: Local and Global Assessments

Last updated October 27, 2009