Scholarship

This paper shares the results of a large-scale longitudinal study in Kenya and examines to what extent school-entry early mathematics and literacy skills predict students’ later achievement. Controlling for socioeconomic status, intervention status, rural versus urban settings and parental literacy, the findings revealed that school-entry mathematics skills were significantly predictive of students’ end of Grade 2 mathematics and reading achievement in English and Kiswahili. Likewise, school-entry English early literacy skills predicted students’ end of Grade 2 mathematics and reading achievement in English and Kiswahili. As one of the first articles in this area of research in a low-income country, this article extends earlier research on links between elements of school readiness and later achievement in high-income countries.

Professor Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh

Source: CampusMemo

The Spring/Summer issue of SF State Magazine includes a “Changemaker” profile of alum J Patterson, who received the California State University Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Patterson, who has a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from SF State and returned to the University last fall to earn a master’s degree in Social Work, says one of her dreams is to become a Bay Area social worker and provide youth services. Drawing from her experience growing up, Patterson made it her mission to work on issues around intersectionality to improve the quality of life for young people.

Read story in SF State Magazine

Excellence in Teaching Award (Tenure-Track)

Gretchen L. George

Gretchen L. George receives this year’s Excellence in Teaching Award for tenure track faculty in recognition of the exemplary quality and impact of her achievements in pedagogy.

In her position as associate professor of Nutrition & Dietetics and program lead in the Family, Interiors, Nutrition & Apparel Department, she facilitates learning through nutrition education, metabolism, community nutrition and research courses. George is passionate about prevention and empowerment and provides an unparalleled level of commitment as a mentor, role model and advisor for Dietetics students and future dietitians. In the classroom, she includes students in her food literacy and basic needs research on the community and college students. More recently, she has begun exploring weight stigma in health-related majors from a social justice perspective, with the overall goal of eliminating weight bias in health professionals through incorporation of intuitive eating models in the classroom. Beyond the focus on eliminating weight bias, an imperative goal of hers is to strengthen the understanding of what health means, connecting individual, trauma, access, environment and biological mechanisms to dispel stigmatizing false information.

Excellence in Teaching Award (Lecturer)

Sarah Pawlowsky

Sarah Pawlowsky, associate clinical professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, receives this year’s Excellence in Teaching Award for lecturers in recognition of the exemplary quality and impact of her achievements in pedagogy.

Pawlowsky has been a full-time lecturer in Physical Therapy at SF State for the past six years. She is a valued member of the team with her excellent teaching skills, musculoskeletal content knowledge and clinical expertise.

Students praised her thorough, well-organized lectures; her integration of material throughout the course; her great feedback on assignments; the clinical relevance of her teaching; her accessibility and approachability; her solid foundation of knowledge; her open-mindedness and her commitment to making sure all students’ voices are heard. They also noted her ability to adjust to the learning pace of each student and her willingness to go above and beyond as a teacher and faculty member.

Excellence in Service Award

Larry Vitale

Larry Vitale, lecturer in the School of Nursing, has been awarded the CHSS Excellence in Service Award for his dedication to service activities that impact student success and enhance the SF State community.

Vitale inspires students to seek community service, working tirelessly to create opportunities and broaden the students’ experiences beyond traditional health care settings. He is an exceptional educator and mentor to nursing students. Over years of collaboration with Vitale, the SF State School of Nursing has provided free preventative services to community members without access to care and health education from student nurses under his supervision. Vitale has established, maintained and expanded volunteer opportunities for our students in with a variety of organizations and communities in San Francisco. He created opportunities for our nursing students that enabled them to contribute to San Francisco’s response to the pandemic, while learning valuable skills and progressing through the nursing program. Vitale has since coordinated volunteer assignments for hundreds of student nurses, forming the backbone of support to meet COVID testing demands. He continues to lead and inspire a new generation of nurses.

Excellence in Scholarship Award

Elif Balin

The College has awarded Assistant Professor of Counseling Elif Balin the Excellence in Scholarship Award for her support of student-initiated research that evolves above and beyond the requirements for a degree.

Dr. Balin’s career priority is to train professional counselors who understand and apply career counseling and college counseling through systemic and culturally competent practices in various service and advocacy areas in the higher education, community mental health settings and beyond.

Her research projects and the related literature show that there is limited understanding and application of the multicultural and social justice counseling competencies, advocacy competencies, and international/global perspectives in career counseling and related educational settings. Counselors in these settings struggle to integrate such skills and advocacy into their work due to multiple organizational structure limitations. Her students’ feedback about their graduate training and internship experiences aligns with this finding.

Dr. Balin shared these student voices with the editor and author of several counseling skills textbooks, who offered her the opportunity to create a team with counselor educators and students to produce a series of training videos that are more culturally responsive, concise and relevant educational materials. In addition to her colleagues, Dr. Balin invited her graduate students (Atheena Haniff-Martinez, Alona Harris, Emily Jackson, Philip Payumo Jucaban, Zdravko Rozic and Paul Smith) to create a new series for the project, Moments of Excellence in Counseling and Therapy: Learning What Works for Relationship Building and Increased Effectiveness at Mindscape Commons.

Excellence in Teaching (Tenure-Track)

Molly McManus

Assistant Professor, Department of Child & Adolescent Development

Molly E. McManus began her career in education as a bilingual early elementary school teacher in Oakland and San Francisco. In the classroom, she developed a deep respect for and curiosity around the sophisticated knowledge and capabilities that young Latinx children from immigrant families demonstrate when offered culturally sustaining, agentic learning opportunities. This respect and curiosity carry over into her teaching and learning with undergraduates in the Department of Child & Adolescent Development, where Molly designs learning opportunities that center students own developmental experiences as an entry point into exploring the cultural nature of development and its connections to practice and advocacy.

McManus earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a concentration in Human Development and Learning Sciences and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship with the Agency and Young Children Research Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship centers the perspectives of young children of color and focuses on the cultural nature of learning and development. McManus investigates the impact of different school-learning experiences on young children of color, particularly considering how young Latinx children of immigrants identify as learners and understand the process of learning. She explores the social, academic, cultural and linguistic implications of these learning experiences from the perspectives of young children themselves and examine how teachers and systems shape the type and quality of children’s learning experiences. Her scholarship has been published in a range of journals including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education.

Excellence in Teaching (Lecturer)

Hamida Nusrat 

Lecturer, Clinical Laboratory Science Program

Hamida Nusrat teaches, trains and mentors Clinical Laboratory Science (CLS) and Public Health Microbiology (PHM) interns and works as a public health microbiologist at Solano County Public Health Lab. She earned her M.S./Ph.D. in Clinical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Karachi, Pakistan, and holds dual faculty positions in the CLS Program at SF State and in the Post-Baccalaureate Program at UC Berkeley. Nusrat has always been inspired by biomedical sciences and their relevance in day-to-day life and is passionate about training students in various disciplines of clinical and public health microbiology on new methodologies of innovative diagnostic assays. She received 14 enthusiastic nominations for this award from students based on her performance in course design and pedagogy, teaching effectiveness and student development.

Nusrat has been a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) since 2003 and of Northern California-ASM (NCASM) since 2008. She has served at NCASM in various leadership roles over the years and has been actively involved in the Board and Planning Committee meetings for making revisions for uplifting the organization. In her strategic position as the LabAspire Public Health Laboratory Director (PHLD) Training Program coordinator, affiliated with California Department of Public Health (CDPH), she networks with public health microbiology experts from Ukiah to San Diego, schedules meetings with state and county public health agencies, tracks and maintains training documents for the PHLD fellows, and prepares and submits the annual grant budget for the LabAspire PHLD Training Program. She is also actively involved in the training and certification of PHM interns through CDPH.

Excellence in Scholarship

Kate Hamel

Professor, Department of Kinesiology

Kate Hamel earned her P.hD. in Biomechanics and Locomotion Studies with a minor in Gerontology from Pennsylvania State University in 2002. Her broad interdisciplinary background in engineering, kinesiology, biomechanics and gerontology led to her current research program, the MAREY Lab, which is primarily focused on age-related changes in sensory systems and cognitive processes and how these changes impact the biomechanics of gait and balance in older adults.

The MAREY Lab conducts state-of-the-art research in the areas of biomechanics, motor learning and development, motor control, visual perception, gerontology and rehabilitation and provides research training opportunities for SF State students that are comparable in rigor to what they might receive at a R1 institution. These opportunities are grounded in developing self-efficacy and mastery in the research process and provide exposure and opportunity for a student population that is often marginalized in more traditional research settings. For many of the students, these experiences are critical to their development — they often have no exposure to research prior to participating in the lab and may never have considered the doors that it can open and the opportunities it can provide in terms of their future careers.

Hamel has mentored more than 75 undergraduate and graduate students through her research group, and over 80 percent have been women, students of color and/or students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Nearly all the undergraduate students from her lab have gone on to graduate or professional degree programs and many of her graduate students have continued on to Ph.D., DPT, DO, MD and PA programs, with a handful going on to manage research labs themselves. She has also provided research experience and laboratory training for hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students in the MAREY Lab through the courses that she teaches, including KIN 437/747, KIN 680, KIN 730 and KIN 736.

Excellence in Service

Anthony Mayo

Lecturer, Department of Kinesiology

Anthony Mayo has been a part of the Department of Kinesiology at SF State since earning his master's degree in 2003. He was a lecturer from 2006-2009, went to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, and then returned as a lecturer in 2013 as a lecturer. In addition to teaching many of the department’s core, emphasis and senior classes over the years,Mayo has gone above and beyond in offering his service to the department, most prominently in his role as an advisor for the Kinesiology Student Association (KSA).

The KSA offers several career-focused events through the year (e.g., career nights, graduate school extravaganza), puts on the department’s research expo and plans and executes the department's recognition ceremony. Mayo has worked significantly to help KSA and its officers succeed. He attends all the meetings for the organization, offers feedback on events, connects students with speakers and networking opportunities, provides ideas for their year-long agenda and keeps them on track as they work toward their goals. 

Mayo has been a mentor and advocate for more than 25 students over the past five years, many of them first-generation college students who need guidance with navigating the University system, figuring out prerequisites for graduate school and determining the experiences needed to get into a program. Mayo helps them with this process, including meeting to talk about their career plans, editing drafts of their personal statements and resumes and discussing specific ways that they can strengthen their applications to allied health graduate programs. These students have gone on to physical therapy school, occupational therapy school, chiropractic school and medical school, among others, and at top schools across the country.

Excellence in Teaching Award (Tenured/Tenure-Track)

Linda Platas, Child & Adolescent Development

Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Development Linda Platas received the Excellence in Teaching Award for tenured faculty in recognition of her broad range of accomplishments. Her primary areas of research are child development, early childhood education, early math and literacy development, professional development and teacher education, and the formation and implementation of early childhood public policy.

Platas has taught nine courses in child development, curriculum, early childhood education, professional development, research and public policy in the Department of Child. & Adolescent Development. Her experience includes 14 years of working directly with children and families as a teacher and director of an early childhood program.

Internationally, she has worked on preschool and early primary grades population-level child assessment and classroom observation instruments. She has also worked with ministries of education in low-resource countries on school readiness, curriculum development, early math and literacy assessments, and classroom quality measurement.

She serves as an expert in international meetings on early mathematics and literacy development for UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, and other non-governmental organizations. She is also a member of the Expert Panel that developed the Early Grades Math Assessment (EGMA) for USAID, the Technical Advisory Group for Child Development and Learning for UNESCO, and the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network.

Excellence in Teaching Award (Lecturers)

Deborah Craig, Public Health

Deborah Craig of the Department of Public Health received the Excellence in Teaching Award for lecturers. She received the strongest nomination from students for lecturer faculty regarding the exemplary quality and impact of her achievements in pedagogy. Her background is in public health, teaching, writing, technology, music and the visual arts, and she currently teaches writing and LGBTQI health in the Department of Public Health at SF State. She also produces documentary films about health issues, such as HIV/AIDS and LGBT aging.

Craig has designed “LGBTQI Health: Health Disparities and Sexual/Gender Minority Communities,” an undergraduate health education course that focuses on how stigmatization of queer communities contributes to health disparities, and “Introduction to Public Health,” an overview of public health advances and public health concepts — with a focus on health disparities — geared specifically toward the post-baccalaureate pre-medical students in SF States’ Health Professions program.

She also teaches “The Health Education Profession,” an undergraduate Health Education course that provides an overview of the health education profession and emphasizes writing and analytical skills.

Excellence in Service Award

Sheldon Gen, Public Affairs & Civic Engagement

Associate Professor Sheldon Gen of the School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement was awarded the College’s Excellence in Service Award for his dedication to service activities that impact student success and enhance the SF State community. His courses cover public policy processes, civic engagement in public policy, policy analysis, program evaluation, environmental policy and education policy. He also advises MPA students in the public policy and environmental administration emphases.

Gen has been instrumental in serving in ways that impact student success, most significantly through his work on the Teagle Initiative at SF State, which supports enhancing student success through curricular revisions. He served as a faculty lead for this initiative in his own department and was then selected to lead this initiative throughout the CSU system. 

He has also been instrumental in promoting sustainability education. He led the development of a Student Sustainability Investment Fund and the development of an associated course. Through this course, and a $250,000 allocation to the fund, students will be able to direct the investment of real funds for sustainability initiatives.

In addition, he is an Advisory Board member of the Funding the Next Generation project, which has brought community expertise onto campus. This project has been linked to six different MPA course sections and provided students with opportunities to analyze municipal budgets, assess political settings for children's funds and explore alternative funding streams for children. 

Excellence in Scholarship Award

Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Public Health

The College presented Professor Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh with the Excellence in Scholarship award for her support of student-initiated research that evolves above and beyond the requirements for a degree. A social epidemiologist and professor in SF State’s Department of Public Health, Sanchez-Vaznaugh is also affiliated faculty at SF State’s Health Equity Institute and the Center for Health Equity at UCSF.

Her extensive research has focused on critical social justice issues in public health based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and local community factors. She has been a generous mentor to many students in her department, and several of them have been authors on publications and presentations. Her recent research has been funded by the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and involves studies on temporal changes in the fast food environment near schools, the influence of policies that regulate food and drinks in schools on racial or ethnic obesity disparities, and decision-making focused on physical activity strategies in schools.

San Francisco State University’s College of Health & Social Sciences presented its Faculty Excellence Awards at the College’s Fall Opening Meeting on August 26. These awards were established to underscore the College’s deep commitment to excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.

Each awardee received $750 and a certificate signed by Dean Alvin Alvarez and Associate Dean John Elia. Student research assistants also received award certificates and a gift from the College. (Faculty award winners are pictured below with Associate Dean John Elia.)

Excellence in Teaching Award

Associate Professor of Recreation, Parks & Tourism Pavlína Látková received the Excellence in Teaching Award for tenured faculty in recognition of her broad range of accomplishments. Her teaching and research interests are in community-based tourism, international development, sustainable travel and resident attitudes towards tourism development. Látková shares her enthusiasm and dedication to the subject by incorporating different teaching methods including group projects, guest lectures and field trip activities.

When she is not discussing sustainable tourism efforts with her class in Costa Rica during spring break, coordinating the 400-hour culminating internship experience for graduating seniors, organizing student retreats each semester and planning the semi-annual career fair, you can find her preparing to implement new curriculum and pedagogical ideas. Her creative instructional contributions include RPT 605: Ecotourism Principles and Practices and RPT 470: Travel with Purpose — a faculty-led, study abroad program.

More than 20 students collaborated on Látková’s nomination. They described her as an inspiring professor and mentor who genuinely cares for and supports her students, always showing great commitment in helping them successfully accomplish what they set out to achieve.

Ana Maria Barrera of the Department of Kinesiology received the Excellence in Teaching Award for lecturers. Her interest and passion revolves around social justice and supporting underrepresented populations, and her instruction focuses on reflective and dynamic learning processes that maximize student learning and foster cooperative and collaborative learning environments. Barrera recently developed a new course that instantly became an essential foundation for the successful educational and developmental experience for kinesiology students to ultimately become self-sufficient lifelong learners.

Through appreciative advising, Barrera helps students realize their potential and use their strengths as resources. She strongly believes that students become empowered when someone listens to them and cares about their well-being and needs as they navigate higher education. Barrera started her department’s peer advising program, and has also developed several long-term and systematic advising strategies to enhance the quality of advising. Her talents have been recognized at the University level and she was appointed as a member of the Dream Resource Center Advisory Board for undocumented students. Her passion for diverse and underserved populations is also evident in her doctoral dissertation topic, which focused on documenting undocumented students’ experiences in higher education and how such experiences impact their academic success and fulfillment.

Excellence in Service Award

Associate Professor Jackson Wilson of the Department of Recreation, Parks & Tourism was awarded the College’s inaugural Excellence in Service Award for his dedication to service activities that impact student success and enhance the SF State community. Wilson has a strong commitment to directly cultivating practical knowledge and skills to enable students to achieve their professional goals and help them become better citizens. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in research methods, leadership, organization management and information technology.

Wilson has been a faculty fellow for Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) since 2015 and currently serves as the lead faculty fellow. He continues to serve as a faculty researcher in a CSU-wide online education research project (SQuAIR), serves as a faculty fellow with the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning, co-chairs one of the AMP working groups and serves on SF State’s Enrollment Management Committee. At the college level, Dr. Wilson has served on the Leave with Pay Committee and the Elections Committee and on the FINA RTP committee. He is also the department graduate coordinator and leads the multi-campus Master of Science in Recreation, Parks & Tourism collaboration with two other CSU campuses.

Excellence in Scholarship Award

The College awarded Assistant Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies Valerie Francisco-Menchavez the Excellence in Scholarship award for her support of student-initiated research that evolves above and beyond the requirements for a degree. She provided opportunities for students Stephanie Ancheta, Jessa Delos Reyes, Katrina Liwanag, Tiffany Mendoza and Jeannel Poyaoan to assist in data collection and analysis by training them in qualitative and quantitative research methods, such as interviewing respondents, conducting focus groups and administering surveys. Together as a group, they wrote a co-authored peer-reviewed publication, “Claiming Kapwa: Filipino Immigrants, Community Based Organizations and Community Citizenship in San Francisco,” which was presented at UC Davis’ inaugural Filipino American political symposium in 2018, the CHSS Annual Showcase in 2018 and the SOMA Pilipinas Community Network gathering in 2019.

As an educator, Francisco-Menchavez continues to develop her pedagogy to engage students’ ideas and spirit in learning how to analyze the world of sociology. She does this by preparing her courses with a global perspective and preparing a range of learning activities in and outside of her classroom that cultivate students’ ability to think critically about the complex times we live in and in their potential to change the world.

SF State researchers created a new software tool for evaluating health content on universities’ health center websites

The project was led by a team composed of San Francisco State Associate Professors Anagha Kulkarni from Computer Science, Venoo Kakar and Sepideh Modrek from Economics, Anastasia Smirnova from Linguistics and Carrie Holschuh from Nursing, along with their students.

Modrek says that colleges formerly based their student health policies on the residential models of the 1950s and 1960s, which were predominantly for male students living on campus. Since then, campus demographics have changed dramatically, as have the health care and contraception landscapes. The researchers wanted to know if universities were keeping up with the changing times.

The answer: it depends. Focusing on public four-year universities in the United States, the team used a newly developed software tool to look for information about condoms, pap tests, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) and injectables on universities’ health center websites. Of the 545 schools assessed, 66% had some information about contraception. Kakar added that these results can be visualized on an interactive map hosted on her website.

Further analysis revealed that schools with higher female student populations were more likely to have accessible contraception information, while schools with more low-income students (based on Pell grant recipients) were less likely. Information about LARCs/injectables was significantly more common at schools offering medical degrees.

“I think that the map was not surprising,” said Modrek. “It’s what you expected, but it’s a stark reminder that these disparities — beyond the [topics of gender and income discussed in the paper] — are [also] regional. The same places that now want to ban abortions offer limited information on contraception to students.”

These findings were published in Contraception Journal. A second paper by the team, published in JMIR Formative Research, describes the software tool they developed for the study, called Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information (QMOHI). The researchers’ goal is not that all schools should present the same information, Modrek explains, but to encourage schools to continuously evaluate and update websites to meet students’ needs.

“Talking about [these resources] is important because it will reduce the barriers that students have to access contraceptive care or reproductive health in general,” said Kakar.

Although the researchers are focusing on contraception, the team hopes that QMOHI can be applied more broadly.

“There isn’t anything like QMOHI out there — at least not in the open source, free-to-use public domain — where the public health researcher can simply give the software a list of universities that they want to study and the topic that they want to study at these universities,” said Kulkarni. Her lab spearheaded the development of QMOHI, which assesses online information based on eight quality metrics, including navigability, prevalence, coverage and readability.

The software is currently limited to assessing student health center websites. But Kulkarni would love to expand it to other health topics on other websites or see it used beyond health care for social topics like critical race theory.

However, Modrek notes that it’s no coincidence that this team chose to study contraceptive health. An interdisciplinary team of female faculty led the project.

“As you bring more female scholars into data science and computer science, you ask questions that are relevant to different populations,” explained Modrek.

Kakar agrees, noting that this project would not have been possible without each of these faculty and their expertise. “It makes me think that such projects exemplify the essence of SF State, the interdisciplinary nature of things and how we innovate more when we talk to each other and not live in our silos,” said Kakar.

Source: SF State News

Program

Jump to specific time in video:

• Introduction by Dean Alvarez
• "A phenomenological study of critical aspects of pandemic academic work," by Mickey Eliason
• Moderator and Panelist Introductions
• Panel Discussion
• Q&A

Panelists

Gretchen L. George, Ph.D., RDN, ACUE (moderator)

Associate Professor of Nutrition & Dietetics, FINA

Gretchen L. George is passionate about prevention and empowerment. In her position as associate professor of Nutrition and Dietetics and program lead in the Family, Interiors, Nutrition & Apparel Department at SF State, she facilitates learning through nutrition education, metabolism, community nutrition and research courses. In the classroom she includes students in her food literacy and basic needs research on the community and college student. More recently she has begun exploring weight stigma in health-related majors from a social justice perspective, with the overall goal of eliminating weight bias in health professionals through incorporation of intuitive eating models in the classroom. Beyond the focus on eliminating weight bias, an imperative goal of hers is to strengthen the understanding of what health means, connecting individual, trauma, access, environment, and biological mechanisms to dispel stigmatizing false information. In her free time, Dr. George lectures for Stanford Healthy Living, part of the BeWell Program, enjoys hiking, and loves traveling with her family.  

Julie Chronister, Ph.D.

Professor, Counseling

Julie Chronister is a professor in the Department of Counseling at SF State and a faculty member in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. She is a committed teacher, scholar and advocate who has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and books. Dr. Chronister has received funding from NIMH to conduct research in the area of social support and serious mental illness and has been awarded training grants from the RSA to provide scholarships for her students. She is committed to improving the lives of the most marginalized and stigmatized communities through her research, teaching, and community partnerships.

Dr. Chronister received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2004 and has been writing and conducting research in the areas of social support, coping, caregiving, serious mental illness and disability for more than a decade. She is also a co-editor of the book, Understanding Psychosocial Adjustment to Chronic illness and Disability, and has presented at mre than 50 national conferences. Dr. Chronister is on the editorial board of several top-tier peer-reviewed journals and is currently a CALPCC board member.

Dr. Chronister recently received a behavioral health workforce grant from DHHS to fund the Equity and Justice-Focused Integrated Behavioral Health Counselor Training Project, of which she is the principal investigator. The project aims to increase the supply of counselors trained to work in integrated behavioral health settings from an equity and justice-focused orientation. A primary aim of the project is to strengthen relationships with community health centers that provide services to the most underserved, including our communities of color and other communities that have been harmed by our health care system.

Ruby N. Turalba, MPH

Lecturer, Public Health

Ruby Turalba is a child of immigrants from La Union, Philippines. She is an educator, ally, and mentor who describes herself as a scholar practitioner working for community, health and justice. She has been teaching public health at SF State since 2010, and her teaching practices integrate cultural humility, liberation education and personal narratives to explore social and health inequities. She has served 2000+ undergraduates, many who are low-income, immigrant, and first-generation college students of color. She regularly infuses class time with health and wellness, self-reflexivity and relationship building.

Much of her community work centers on the health and wellness of the Filipino community, particularly in the South of Market area. In partnership with a local organization, she recently conducted a Community-Based Participatory Action Research project working with multi-generational, multilingual community health ambassadors to improve health among Filipino residents of San Francisco. While the primary focus was on chronic diseases, the project pivoted in response to the pandemic and included COVID-19/vaccine education, distribution of basic needs to seniors and families, as well as mental health and community support while in lockdown. The opportunity also provided workforce development and employment opportunities especially during economic uncertainty. The initiative was truly a collaborative effort among Filipino residents, scholars, activists, and entrepreneurs embodying the spirit of Bayanihan/community and kapwa/connection.

She previously worked in tobacco prevention within school, community, and health department agencies and is now working on a project that focuses on the development of students’ self-confidence, positive identity, and sense of belonging in relation to their participation in a Filipino language program at their school. She is also currently pursuing an educational doctorate and is a research consultant for the South of Market Community Action Network, a non-profit serving Filipinos in San Francisco.

Stephanie Windle, DNP, RN, CNE

Assistant Professor, Nursing

Stephanie Windle is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at SF State. She received her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree from the University of San Francisco and her MSN and BSN from the University of Wisconsin. She teaches psychiatric mental health nursing and integrates holistic health content and healing practices in the curriculum.

Her research focus is on teaching guided imagery in undergraduate nursing education and teaching stress management skills to nurses and nursing students. She teaches guided imagery and relaxation techniques in our skills lab to give students a chance to both experience and provide those practices. She also chairs the School of Nursing Success and Wellness Committee and provides brief stress management tips in the weekly School of Nursing newsletter. Dr. Windle also works with horses and has an equine therapy practice that harnesses the power of horses for healing, growth and insight.

SF State researchers win NIH funds to study anti-racist healing in nature

In times of duress, many individuals turn to nature for solace. It is a classic form of self-care that has become increasingly important during the pandemic. However, this seemingly simple intervention is not always accessible to Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities — communities that are already challenged by well-documented health inequities.

Now a team of San Francisco State University scientists will be studying the impact of nature on the health of those communities thanks to $2.7 million in grant support from a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative.

“We’re really interested in the psychosocial aspects of chronic disease and stress and people’s habits, and all of this relative to this intervention of walking in nature,” explained San Francisco State Professor of Psychology Charlotte Tate.

Although nature is an ancestral healing place for many communities, these spaces can be unwelcoming, unsafe or triggering for people of color. By collaborating with community members, Tate and her colleagues hope to help reclaim natural spaces and mitigate growing health disparities. This study builds upon an earlier project that was co-led by SF State Professor of Biology Leticia Márquez-Magaña that reported the health benefits of walking for Latinx communities.

Using a transdisciplinary approach, researchers will collaborate with transitional-age Black, Latinx, Pilipinx and Pacific Islander youth to document their experiences and biologic metrics. The data will then be assessed at psychological, biological and epidemiological levels, looking at a range of measures from how the intervention affects mental health to changes in molecular biomarkers.

“I think part of our intentional approach is not just to study people as experimental subjects, but really to [use an approach that is] very consistent with an anti-racist and critical race theory approach to raise their critical consciousness while participating in the research,” said SF State Assistant Professor of Public Health David Rebanal. He and Tate also underscore that the project is led by diverse BIPOC researchers who are focusing on their own communities.

The five-year project (grant #OD033243-01) is one of 11 supported by the NIH’s Common Fund’s Transformative Research to Address Health Disparities and Advance Health Equity initiative, a new program supporting highly innovative, translational research projects, which if successful will prevent, reduce or eliminate health disparities and advance health equity.

It’s not lost on the researchers how innovative — and messy — this research will be. More often than not, public health, biology and psychology research are kept on their own tracks, so there is no template for this sort of collaborative interdisciplinary project, Tate says. Rebanal agrees, adding that working directly with individuals in the community means their experiments will also be less controlled than a traditional biomedical study.

Although it is going to be a learning experience, the researchers hope their study will lay the foundation for future projects and an acceptance of transdisciplinary work as critical to the future of biomedical research. For BIPOC populations to have effective health interventions, Rebanal says, they need solutions that come from within their own communities.

“You know, [this proposal] was risky in some ways because it’s one thing to strive for equitable health opportunities, but it’s another thing to be anti-racist,” said Rebanal. “I think that the next level for this kind of work is to figure out what can we do that’s anti-racist, not just inclusionary.”