What brought you to the UAB School of Public Health?

I grew up in Birmingham, so UAB has always been on my radar. I was particularly excited to return and work in the School of Public Health because of its commitment to working with community members to address issues in Birmingham, the state and the Deep South.

What is the broad focus of your research?

Broadly, my research is focused in transportation equity and childhood injury prevention. Recently I've been working to establish novel methods and theoretical frameworks in how we approach transportation equity issues, which I use to develop resources and interventions. Current projects I'm working on are focused in child passenger safety, transportation among neurodivergent populations, community-based resiliency factors in childhood injury and pediatric vehicular heatstroke.

Where did you receive your training and degrees?

I completed my bachelor’s in psychology at the University of Alabama. I have a Ph.D. in Lifespan Developmental Psychology and an MPH in Health Behavior from UAB. After finishing graduate school, I completed a postdoc in epidemiology at the Center for Injury Prevention and Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.

What is the most exciting project you are currently working on?

Currently, there are widening disparities in crash outcomes for child passengers. To understand why this is happening, as part of my R00 project funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) I am preparing to start complimentary studies at Children's of Alabama/UAB and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia focused on identifying post-crash factors that influence outcomes for vulnerable crash-involved child passengers. This includes studies that will explore data in EHR records, interviews with healthcare providers who assess, treat and discharge crash-involved children and a longitudinal cohort study of crash-involved children.

What is your favorite self-authored manuscript?

My favorite manuscript is one very recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, primarily because of the cool graphic, recommendations and findings it produced. Briefly, using data linked at the individual-level, we compared reported injuries from state crash reports to those documented in hospital records for crash-involved child passengers. We also explored injury severity and location information, and if that information varied by the type of restraint the child was reportedly in at the time of the crash and the child's age. Thankfully, very few children were more than minorly injured in crashes, and we found strong support that child restraint systems are very effective at preventing injuries. That said, crash reports appeared to overestimate injuries and incorrectly reported injury location and severity. This has major implications for crash outcome research, policies and resource allocation, which primarily rely on crash report data.

What professional accomplishment are you most proud of so far in your career?

Outside of receiving my K99/R00 award and joining UAB as a faculty member, I am most proud of being named a "STAT Wunderkind" and the Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Trainee at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in 2023. I am extremely grateful to all of my mentors who have enabled me to achieve success in my research so far, and who have specifically taught me how to balance research and work with a full, busy personal life.

What is the coolest training or program you've been a part of, or your favorite conference you've attended?

I have been a certified child passenger safety technician since graduate school, and every time I renew my certification or attend community events and child passenger stakeholder conferences, I am amazed by the work community members and stakeholders do to protect children in vehicles. It's an easy reminder of why I am doing the research that I am doing.

What kind of research would you like to be doing that you haven’t yet had the opportunity to do?

I am starting to dive into the health impacts of non-driving related license suspensions, which falls into a larger topic of general fines and fees research. I am also very interested in expanding my research to intentional injuries, like gun violence.

If you had the funding to answer one research questions what would that question?

This is a hard one! I would love to have a simple answer to the question, "How we can create transportation policies and efforts that improve access and safety outcomes for vulnerable groups across the lifespan?" I think that would probably involve re-inventing our current system and priorities, and definitely expand to efforts outside of transportation itself.

If you weren’t in academia, what would your career be?

As a mother of a young child, I really like the idea of consignment and second-hand baby stores but have only seen them executed well a few times. Baby gear is so expensive and so much of it ends up in landfills when it could be re-used! So, I would love to have a store and non-profit that works to create a community of caregivers and educates and invests in a "greener" or more sustainable baby product market.