Seed Grant Funded Projects

Assistant Professor of Writing, Health Policy & Management and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies,  Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
Research Title: project writehealing, policy and praxis (WHPP)

Research Description

The writehealing, policy and praxis project (WHPP) is a community engaged effort that employs community-informed digital/narratives to propose writing, policy and praxis-focused behavioral change solutions to community health challenges such as birthing justice and intergenerational traumas. Students will engage with SPACEs in Action to develop writing projects, across genres and for action-oriented efforts in the DC area. SPACEs in Action participants/community members will participate in a writehealing curriculum and digital storytelling workshop, focused on wellness, self-care and uncovering trauma through narrative. They will have the option to opt-in into an action-oriented policy advocacy training. The goal is to share accessible mindfulness and advocacy strategies, as a measure of self-determination.

Visiting Professor of Clinical Law; Director of the Medical and Legal Partnership Clinic, George Washington University Law School
Research Title:  Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP)

Research Description

The Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) project is an interprofessional, community-based effort that brings professionals from the medical, legal, and public health fields together to identify and treat social and legal issues that result in poor health among patients. Low-income renter households in Washington, D.C. often experience significant and dangerous housing-related barriers to health. For example, 60% of evictions occur East of the river, the asthma rate in Wards 7 and 8 is 95-100%, 43% of the region's food insecure population is Black and another 26%, Hispanic. In light of the significant and dangerous housing-related barriers to health, this project aims to increase health equity by removing barriers to safe and decent housing. The project will:

• Provide legal assistance in an MLP: law students from the Jacob Burns Community Legal Clinics of GW Law School will be embedded as specialists in the healthcare setting in order to address the legal causes of poor health for low-income patients. For example, students will represent low-income tenants in housing conditions cases, leveraging the city’s housing laws, to resolve respiratory distress and other health harming legal needs.
• Support community-led solutions: interprofessional teams of students will partner with community organizers and tenant associations while exercising cultural humility and active listening skills to 1) train the community in legal rights and gaps, and 2) support the community in defining the problem and identifying solutions to address the political and legal determinants of poor health.
• Advocate for structural and systemic remediation: interprofessional teams of students will collaborate with the community and other professionals to engage in policy advocacy that addresses longstanding and root causes of health inequity, including the political and legal determinants of poor health, as identified by the community.
• This innovative project has been made possible by the generous support of two GW Law School alums and champions.

Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School
Research Title:  The Prosecutor’s Paradox: How Race-Neutral Prosecutions Drive Racial Disparities & How Race-Neutral Reforms Can Help

Research Description

Prosecutors in every large jurisdiction in the country face a paradoxical problem: even if they treat every case before them in a race-neutral manner, they will impose substantially harsher penalties on Black defendants than they will on White defendants who engage in the same illegal behavior. This state of affairs is the result of a poorly-understood combination of two pervasive phenomena: the over-policing of nonviolent offenses in Black communities and escalating sanctions for repeat offenses. This problem accounts for a substantial part of racial disparities in criminal penalties and yet, as of this writing, no one has described the structure of this problem or offered solutions. In this article, we do both.

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Research Title: Building COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence among Nurses and in Communities  

Research Description

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Research Title: Medical Legal Partnerships (MLP)

Research Description

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Assistant Professor & Center Director, Milken Institute School of Public Health
Research Title: The Center for Community Resilience EquityDashboard: A Platform for Accountability & Systems Change

Research Description

Acting as a GPS for economic and social policies, the Center for Community Resilience’s (CCR) Equity Dashboard model show place-based investments promote equity over time across key indices such as race, income, and education. Using system dynamics modeling, the dashboard forecasts and tracks social and economic return on investment by measuring expected gains across multiple sectors, including employment, criminal justice, housing, health, and education. Generated by models specifically built to each community’s unique context, these customizable simulations project how a combination of policy and systems change, coupled with public and private investments, can contribute to improved outcomes for children and families. By adjusting levers that represent policy change and investments (e.g., creation of affordable housing) users can generate a range of simulated outcomes for a given community (e.g., kindergarten readiness or public safety). Community leaders, investors, and policymakers are using these tailored simulations—which leverage big data from the federal, state, and local level and across sectors—to design policies and programs that fit the context of the community, prevent the widening of disparity, and give community members the supports and equitable access to infrastructure needed to thrive.

Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Epidemiology, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
Research Title: The Mental Health Consequences of Parental Incarceration

Research Description

Millions of children are indirectly affected by the carceral system, and children of incarcerated parents experience multiple harms. Prior research discusses the negative (but complex) mental health outcomes for young adults with an incarcerated parent. This study will explore how parental incarceration is related to depression levels among their offspring, how parental incarceration is related to other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and how parental incarceration intersects with layers of social disadvantage. In Part 1 of the grant, my team and I published work that used Waves 1-4 of Add Health and found ACEs were statistically higher the more the parents have been incarcerated, parental incarceration enhanced depression levels, and racialized group membership and gender high higher depression levels but there risks of depression was not enhanced by parental depression. Part 2 expands this work but including the most recent wave of data collection. Part 3 is working with my community partner to explore whether the relationships between parental incarceration, ACEs, and depression is present in the local DC context.

Associate Professor, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
Research Title:  Race, Immigration, and Confinement in Rural Meatpacking: Decentering Whiteness and Mapping Injustices

Research Description

This project pairs social science researchers from GWU with community and civic partners in the two states with the highest concentration of rural meatpacking workers: Minnesota and North Carolina. In these states, most workers in packing plants are Latina/o/x or African-American, and rates of unionization are kept artificially low through legal and corporate initiatives.

Inspired by the work of the immigrant labor advocacy group Contratados, Ken and León are establishing relationships with workers in these states who will provide reviews of their meatpacking employers. On a 5-star system, the workers will rate employers on aspects of their working conditions such as safety, sexual harassment, retaliation, payment of wages, and housing. These reviews help identify the institutional--rather than individual--sources of harm to employees in this sector and allow even non-unionized workers to hold their employers accountable. The project is meant to promote transparency and fairness based on the perspectives of workers who have first-hand knowledge of the conditions of work in this industry.

Director, Energy Innovation Initiative,  School of Engineering and Applied Science
Research Title:  Accessing Community Healthcare with Innovations in Electric Vehicles for Equity (ACHIEVE)

Research Description

The communities at the core of this project are in Wards 7 and 8 in Washington, DC where complex and interrelated drivers like poverty, inequality, poor housing, constricted access to food resources, constrained democratic practices, and the legacy of racist practices such as redlining lead to consequences of high energy burdens, poor health, and reduced transportation options. The project aims to explore the ways new energy, transportation, and healthcare technologies and processes can improve health outcomes. The objective of this project is to create and implement a community-engaged model for synergistically integrating community needs, values, and contacts within the design and implementation of emergent technologies, processes, and policies. The project uses community-based participatory research approaches to engage a variety of community navigators (nursing staff, public housing facilitators, community health workers, and elected public housing resident council members) in discussion-style forums. The forums serve as a mechanism to build relationships between participants and engage in co-learning about participants’ needs, perspectives, and resources. The project will yield relationships, concepts, and methods to support equitable energy and healthcare transitions in the District.

Associate Professor of Medicine, School of Medicine & Health Sciences
Research Title: Debunking the Model Minority Myth: Establishing Community Partnerships to Explore Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Health Disparities

Research Description

Award Amount: $7,500
Commonwealth Fund Contribution: $7,500
Project Summary: The proposed project aims to identify sources of big data and map out resources that include data on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities nationally. We also would like to explore more locally in the Washington DC region, through electronic medical records and databases from GW-affiliated health clinics and assess what information can be accessible on AANHPI in the greater DC region. We also intend to generate a series of hypotheses based on our findings, literature review, and most importantly, inputs from our community partners who will share their knowledge of key health challenges experienced by members of the community.

For this project, OCA-Greater Washington DC, APA Advocates (OCA-DC), a local non-profit supporting civic engagement with the local AANHPI community, is our partner. OCA-DC’s community outreach team will be collaborators offering insight into key health topics and direction regarding data disaggregation – an advocacy focus of the organization. OCADC has an extensive network of partners in the community and can assist with recruiting leaders from other health organizations that can engage in shared decision-making to offer insights into key health topics. In this preliminary project, which initiates a broader understanding of data disaggregation on AANHPI health and their health disparities, community partners will take essential roles in validating our observations and hypotheses – creating the basis for future grant applications to perform more systematic studies on investigating AANHPI health disparities.

This work will fill a critical gap in a significant lack of research in AANHPI health disparities in the greater Washington DC region despite significant population levels with over 1.1 million people who identify as part of AANHPI communities in DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

Associate Dean for Trial Advocacy; Professorial Lecturer in Law; Co-Director of the Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program, George Washington University Law School
Research Title: GW EII Gender and Race Equity Center "Power Reimagined" Pilot

Research Description 

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Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery,  School of Medicine and Health Sciences
Research Title: The Impact of Neocolonialism on Surgical Training Structures in Africa

Research Description

Since the first African country attained independence from colonial rule, surgical training has evolved through three models. The first is a colonial-local master student model, the second is a purely local training model, and the third is a collegiate inter-country model. The three run concurrently and there are varied perceptions of their equivalence in training and competence. We review the historical development of training and seek to further explore the neocolonial underpinnings of how they are perceived and how these various models of training impact positive development of surgical capacity in Africa as opposed to contributing to “brain-drain”. To date, there are no studies in the literature evaluating this systemic issue and we aim to uncover a potentially addressable source of health inequity in this region through virtual interviews, surveys, direct data collection, and in person field research.

Associate Professor, School of Nursing
Research Title: Nursing Home Nurse Staffing Profile with Different Racial/Ethnic Characteristic with Development and Evaluation of Standardized Nursing Language – Knowledge-Based Clinical Decision Support System Module Development and Evaluation

Research Description

Award Amount: $56,250
Commonwealth Fund Contribution: $42,500
Project Summary: Due to interrupted and restricted social contacts, elder immigrants experience more social and linguistic isolation than their nonimmigrant counterparts, and these social vulnerabilities contribute to health inequalities for Korean American elderly (Jang et al., 2021). However, research has not yet studied elderly Korean nursing-home residents in the United States.

To effectively serve the needs of nursing home (NH) residents of different races and ethnicities, a different language decision-making system should be provided. Despite the benefits of employing standardized nursing languages (SNLs) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS), there are no studies about standardized recording and CDSS for RNs and APRNs in NHs that reflect racial and ethnic differences. A newly developed CDSS will be culturally specified for Korean American nurses to secure an optimal nursing-sensitive quality of care. Through this system, learners will be provided with an appropriate SNL system, which was studied by nursing experts. In this study, the SNL knowledge based CDSS will be developed to provide appropriate nursing diagnosis interventions and outcomes decision-making recommendations using NH customized scenarios and inference appliance in English and Korean.

Goodwin, an organization that has supported older adults and those who care for them since 1967, and National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence, a 501(c)3 organization with a mission to enhance and sustain the capacity and competency of nurses to provide quality care to older adults, are our community partners. This collaboration will help identify the specific needs and care Korean residents require and provide a global educational model for nursing home nurses of diverse races and ethnicities.