Faculty & Mentors

Her research focuses on examining the reproductive health outcomes of African immigrant and refugee women. Specifically, she conducts research on culturally-congruent family planning education, contraceptive decision making and uptake, pregnancy outcomes, HIV stigma reduction and access to reproductive health care services for African immigrant and refugee women. She is also interested in focusing on women’s cancers such as ovarian cancer.

Suzanne Dickerson is a full professor who is an expert in in qualitative methods that are central to translational and pragmatic research. Her hermeneutic phenomenological studies provide evidence that the inclusion of the patient/person perspective provides the scaffolding to understand the importance of context and stakeholder participation, which is pivotal in improving interventions and outcomes to promote health and welfare. Her research focuses on patient/technology interactions, including telemedicine for persons with opioid use disorder being treated for Hepatitis C, cancer patients using internet to seek help and support, implantable cardioverter-defibrillator recipients, sleep apnea patients using CPAP and mixed methods using phenomenology to study sleep disturbances in cancer survivors.

Her research focuses on the interaction between nurse care coordinators, patients and their caregivers at the time of hospital discharge. Hewner’s team, which includes primary care physicians, nurse researchers and engineers, examines how technology and health information exchange can improve the delivery of person-centered care during the transition to post-discharge settings.

Smith’s research program examines the effects of multiple environmental exposures on human health. He has conducted studies to better understand 1) the impact of occupational heat exposure on kidney health and 2) lead exposure on a broad set of community health outcomes. Smith holds methodological expertise that bridges the worlds of community-based participatory research with Spanish-speaking populations and data science. He has conducted quantitative analyses including natural language processing (e.g., sentiment analysis and topic modeling), network analysis and machine learning (e.g., conditional inference trees and random forests). He is interested in mentoring the next generation of oncology nurse scientists who are interested in exploring the intersection of environmental health and/or data science with the mentees chosen area of study.

Somayaji’s research focuses on identifying gaps in equitable health care and understanding barriers to critical cancer services including prevention, screening, treatment and supportive care. This lack of access to necessary health programs and services continues to be the biggest challenge to reduce burden of cancer and improving quality of life, especially in underserved populations. Somayaji is working to correct this challenge and to provide proper care to all and believes novel strategies, new programs and interventions are essential to ensure health equity in a complex and evolving health care system.

Dr. Weiss is a Nurse scientist trained in behavioral sleep medicine and geriatric care with experience in med-surgical oncology. She is interested in exploring the mechanisms of cognitive decline and promoting sleep health by sing interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy dietary supplementation , bright light therapy and exercise. She is also exploring the benefits of supplementation with nicotinamide riboside (NR) a form of Vitamin B3 on sleep and cognitive function and the and its impact on serum-based and proteomic-based biomarkers of neurodegeneration.