APE Opportunity: Psychosocial Factors related to Cardiovascular Disease Risk and Resilience in African-American Women

If you are interested, please send a resume to Lakeia Culler (lculler [at] emory [dot] edu) no later than 3/29/24.  Please use subject: Practicum/AAWH.  You may include what would be the cover letter in the body of the email.  Please make sure to include your last name and first name in the title of the resume.

Practicum Opportunity: Psychosocial Factors related to Cardiovascular Disease Risk and Resilience in African-American Women

Our research group, led by Dr. Tené T. Lewis, is seeking an enthusiastic and team-oriented MPH/MSPH student to join our dynamic team for a practicum experience with two on-going NIH-funded research studies focused on African-American women’s health. 

The goal of the studies is to determine whether psychosocial factors (e.g., racism-related stress, resilience, etc.) are related to early cardiovascular disease (CVD) in healthy African-American women and African-American women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Recent research suggests that African-American women aged 35-44 have rates of CVD that are higher than those of African-American men, White men, and White women; and that African-American women with SLE die from cardiovascular disease 20 years earlier than women without SLE. Identifying the determinants of early CVD in these understudied, at-risk groups will be key to designing preventive interventions to ultimately reduce their excess burden of disease.

The students will work closely with Dr. Lewis’ study team over the duration of the year and can expect to gain experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Participant recruitment
• Participant onboarding 
• Participant retention
• Creating study infographics and newsletters for participants using study data and literature review

More specifically, students will gain experience working with study participants by:

• Onboarding participants for the Daily Diaries ancillary study. This includes scheduling zoom meetings with participants where you will present the consent form and assist them in downloading the RealLife Experience app.
• Contacting participants via telephone and text message to remind them of their scheduled appointments.
• Sending weekly emails to participants with the details for their upcoming visit the following week
• Using excel to create weekly spreadsheets of the upcoming participants’ visits that will be sent out to the team weekly.
• Rescheduling appointments when needed while keeping the outlook calendar up to date and organized.
• Working with biostaticians on the team to clean participant data such as the ambulatory blood pressure rates after the participants wear the ambulatory blood pressure cuff/monitor.

Students will also be able to participate in weekly team meetings which provide an opportunity to learn about the day-to-day tasks of running two large studies.