St. David’s CHPR 22nd Annual Conference

Agenda

All podium presentations are in the Auditorium (Room 1.110). Meeting rooms tend to be cold; please bring a sweater or jacket for comfort.

Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Lisa M. Cacari-Stone, PhD, MA, MS

Professor, College of Population Health | Health and Social Policy
Executive Director & PI: Transdisciplinary Research, Equity & Engagement Center (U54) 
University of New Mexico

Dr. Cacari Stone has dedicated over 30 years of public health leadership, practice and policy work. She is the founding Principal Investigator and Director of the Transdisciplinary Research, Equity and Engagement Center for Advancing Behavioral Health (TREE Center) which is one of twelve research centers of excellence funded by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD Grant # U54 MD004811-08). The TREE Center aims to test solutions for eliminating structural racism and advancing health and behavioral health equity. Comprised of over 50 under-represented minority scholars, over 120 community partners from racial and ethnic, rural/frontier and border communities of the southwest the TREE Center trains and mentors postdoctoral, early stage investigators and under-represented minority scholars in conducting community engaged, multi-level intervention research. She has extensive experience working as part of a multidisciplinary team and working effectively with persons from diverse cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds in the roles of Assistant Director with the Robert Wood Johnson Center for Health Policy and Director of the Community Engagement Core (NM CARES Health Disparities Center/P20). Her investigations encompass the macro-level determinants of health (e.g. immigration policy, political ideologies), community level (e.g. access to care, social and contextual influences of substance use), and the individual level (e.g. psychosocial risks factors for hypertension management among Latinos). Her studies along the U.S.-Mexico border have involved multi-disciplinary collaborations (e.g. economics, medical sociology, anthropology) with community and academic partners to develop and evaluate evidence-based interventions and policies that promote health equity. Since 2008, she has acquired over $26 million in extramural competitive research grants as a collaborating Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator. From 2010-2012, she received an NIH grant to conduct a Comparative Effectiveness Study of a Primary Care-Promotora Intervention among Latino Adults with Hypertension in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region. Working with Hidalgo Medical Services, one of the largest federally qualified health centers in New Mexico, she led a team of primary care providers, health administrators, community health workers, doctoral students and faculty researchers from public health, economics, sociology and anthropology. Her expertise is in national, state and local policy developing and is trusted for her work in translating and disseminating data for policy making with governments, community-based organizations and foundations (e.g. Congressional Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee; NM Legislative Health and Human Services Subcommittee; Con Alma Health Foundation; RWJF Access Project; Pan American Health Organization). She is a thought- leader in health equity and has published numerous peer-reviewed policy briefs, public reports and papers. Her science and policy work is supplemented with 15 years of as a behavioral health specialist, state health care administrator and licensed marriage and family therapist. Her applied behavioral health work is complemented with my training in health and social policy and in the social determinants of health at The Heller School, Brandeis University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an expert member of the research group with the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, member of the National Hispanic Science Network, board member to the Prevention Institute (Oakland) and previous WK Kellogg Fellow in Health Equity and Policy. In 2019, she received the Faculty Research Excellence Award in Population Health Science from University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.

Yessenia Castro, PhD

Associate Professor & Associate Dean for Doctoral Education
The University of Texas at Austin, Steve Hicks School of Social Work

Dr. Yessenia Castro earned her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from The Florida State University in 2008. She completed a postdoctoral training program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2010 that focused on disparities-related research among minority and underserved populations, with an emphasis on smoking cessation among Latinos. She is an associate professor in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies the influence of cultural adaptation variables on cancer risk behavior among Latinos. She is particularly interested in understanding how cultural variables combine with known key determinants of smoking to affect cessation outcomes. Her work also incorporates understanding determinants of multiple cancer risk behaviors among Latinos, and she collaborates on research examining social determinants of smoking cessation among individuals of low socioeconomic status and other special populations of smokers.

Heather Cuevas, PhD, APRN, ACNS, FCNS 

Assistant Professor
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Nursing

Dr. Cuevas is interested how experiences of cognitive problems interact with chronic illnesses, specifically type 2 diabetes, and how this interaction contributes to self-management and health. One particular focus is an exploration of how cognitive changes and health are described by people with type 2 diabetes in the Latinx community. She was a participant in NHLBI’s Program to Increase Diversity Among Individuals Engaged in Health-Related Research (PRIDE) and through this mentoring she was awarded funding from a P30 Center (P30 P30NR015335; PI-Kim) and an R21 grant (NIH/NINR R21NR019266, PI Cuevas) to conduct studies evaluating cognitive training’s effects on diabetes self-management. She is also an advanced practice nurse with over 20 years of clinical experience managing persons with diabetes.

Richard R. Flores, PhD

Deputy to the President for Academic Strategies
Department of Mexican American & Latino/a Studies
The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts

Dr. Richard Flores works in the areas of critical theory, performance studies, semiotics, and historical and cultural anthropology. Prior to graduate school he worked in Houston and San Antonio where he was involved in founding and teaching in schools for undocumented Mexican children. He has extensive experience in the area of curriculum development and international studies, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East. Flores developed the College of Liberal Arts Global Initiative for Education and Leadership, a consortium of UT and partner units aimed at delivering educational and leadership training abroad.

Megan Hebdon, PhD, DNP, RN, NP-C

Assistant Professor
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Nursing

Dr. Megan Hebdon is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Texas at Austin. She is dual-doctorally prepared and has worked as a primary care nurse practitioner for almost fourteen years. She has spent six of those in low-resource settings in both Virginia and Texas. Her family caregiving research is informed by her own experiences as a family caregiver for three children with serious chronic health conditions. Her research priorities with family caregiving include caregivers in early-middle adulthood, holistic well-being, complex identity, financial toxicity, and employment.

Janice Hernandez, DNP, RN, FNP-C

Clinical Assistant Professor
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Nursing

Dr. Janice F. Hernandez is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing and serves as Division Chair of The Holistic Adult Health Division, Director of the MSN Program – Leadership in Diverse Settings (LeaDS) and Co-Sponsor for The Hispanic Nursing Student Association. She collaborates with community networks to implement quality improvement and evidence-based projects and focuses on promoting a culture that enables the growth and success of nursing students. As a long-time caregiver with experience and insight, Janice continues to dedicate her work and time assisting informal and family caregivers maintain work/life balance.

Sharon Horner, PhD, RN, FAAN

Professor
Associate Dean for Research
Director, St. David’s CHPR
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Nursing

Dr. Sharon Horner is associate dean for Research and director of the UT Austin School of Nursing’s St. David’s Foundation Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research in Underserved Populations (CHPR). Dr. Horner's research focuses on improving the health of families with children. She has received approximately $3.7 million over 18 years in federal funding for her primary work with school-aged children with asthma and their families who live in rural areas. A recent study, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, tested her intervention in a stratified randomized control trial focused on improving asthma management behaviors of parents and children and reducing asthma symptom frequency and duration, and lung inflammation. The study found significant improvements in children’s asthma-related quality of life, asthma self-management behaviors, skill in using a metered dose inhaler, and reductions in asthma severity, hospitalizations, and emergency department visits.

Elizabeth Muñoz, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts

Cognitive disorders in late life constitute an impending public health crisis. Risks of decline and dementia are not universal, and identifying factors that help explain this variability is key goal for prevention and intervention efforts. Latinx older adults are also at greater risk of cognitive health problems compared to non-Hispanic White older adults and reasons underlying these inequities remain poorly understood. Dr. Muñoz’s research aims to address these issues by examining the extent to which social and psychological stress can help us understand why some people experience more rapid cognitive decline compared to others, and understanding the circumstance under which such stressors may be more detrimental. In this regard, her three active lines of investigation include: 1) the links and mechanisms between stress and cognitive functioning across the lifespan; 2) examinations of unique sources of stress and their links with cognitive function among Latinx adults; 3) applying a within population lens to evaluate associations between social and ethnicity-related sources of stress on cognitive function in Mexican-origin adults. Dr. Muñoz employs employ a variety of research designs to address her research questions, including longitudinal studies across years of assessments, ecological momentary assessments, and an integration of both (e.g., measurement-burst designs).

Miguel Pinedo, PhD 

Associate Professor & HBHE Program Director
The University of Texas at Austin | Health Behavior & Health Education
Department of Kinesiology & Health Education

The goal of Dr. Pinedo's research to inform new paradigms for health policies and programs aimed at reducing health disparities among Latino populations. To meet this goal, he has developed two highly focused lines of research that examine critical social determinants of health that are salient among Latino populations (e.g., immigration-related stressors) that may help explain and address existing health disparities related to substance misuse and use of treatment services. His first line of research examines how stressors stemming from immigration enforcement policies (e.g., deportations, fear of deportation) shape vulnerability to substance misuse among Latinos. His second line of work investigates factors that discourage Latinos in need from using substance use treatment services. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, his research underscores the importance of structural (e.g., immigration policies, deportations), social (e.g., anti-immigration discrimination), and cultural (e.g., cultural perceptions surrounding substance use) factors in influencing the health behaviors, risk practices, and health outcomes of Latinos. Prior to joining UT, Dr. Pinedo received his PhD in Public Health (Global Health) from UC San Diego and completed his postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley. He also previously earned his Master in Public Health from UC Berkeley.

Posters

Poster Instructions

Format: 

• Maximum size to fit a poster display board space 44 in. (H) by 60 in. (W). 
• Hangers will be provided.

Poster Printing: 

• Printing services are available at The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing. Please email your information and file to Janet Ehle at jehle@nursing.utexas.edu before Friday, March 1, 2024. 
• You may submit a PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote file. JPGs are not accepted. 
• For your convenience, you can download UT Austin School of Nursing branded templates. Each template file has several design options. 
• There is an $80 print charge for poster printing. Click here to make online payments before poster pick up in NUR 5.198. Posters will not be delivered to the conference directly. Poster printing is also available at different departments on campus.