2011 Participant Biographies

• Jennifer Anderson
• Graduate Student
• Communication
• Michigan State University

Jenn Anderson is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University and is interested in health communication. She researches how people talk about their health experiences and how to design persuasive health messages to encourage healthy lifestyle behaviors. Currently, she is interested in the influences of culture and religion on health beliefs and behaviors. Her work primarily focuses on issues of body image, weight, nutrition, and exercise behaviors.

Anderson is the project manager for three current community-based research endeavors. Related to the area of cultural influence on health beliefs and behaviors, she is managing a project examining prenatal health beliefs and behaviors among rural women in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. This project is led by Dr. Maria Lapinski and involves a partnership with a clinic in Playa del Carmen, where local "promotoras" (community liaisons with health, human and social services organizations) were involved in project development and data collection. Related to the area of nutrition, Anderson is coordinating a project looking at the ways that low-income parents and children in the Lansing and Jackson area talk about nutrition and eating habits. This project is led by Dr. Khadi Ndiaye and is being carried out with funding and cooperation from the Michigan Nutrition Network. Finally, related to the area of religious influence on health beliefs and behaviors, Anderson is developing a religious-based intervention to increase exercise among Christians. She partnered with a local church for preliminary message development, and plans to implement the intervention in additional area churches as part of her dissertation next year.

• Lisa Bates
• Lecturer
• Interior Design
• Iowa State University

Lisa Bates is a lecturer in Interior Design at the College of Design at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. After completing her MFA in May of 2010, she joined the faculty at Iowa State University to teach undergraduate studio and lecture courses. As a new faculty member, she is enjoying the challenges of transforming from the role of student to teacher.

As a graduate student she was fortunate enough to intern with Iowa State University's Institute for Design Research and Outreach. This interdisciplinary internship exposed her to the possibilities of interior design's ability to collaborate in outreach and research projects in order to support and enhance the communities within Iowa. As part of a research team investigating elder-friendly community design, she discovered her passion for community engagement and how engagement could work well alongside her teaching passion through the use of service-learning methodology. Her thesis research was directly influenced from the findings from the elder-friendly community internship through the proposed use of an interior design studio as a service-learning course studying appropriate housing options for Iowa communities.

Bates' research interests relate to interior environment's impact on the health and well-being of aging populations. Her other professional and research interests involve service-learning, elder-friendly community design, and developing socially responsive designers through educational experiences. She looks forward to the opportunity to serve as faculty while closely working with communities through engagement and outreach.

• Stephanie Budhai
• Graduate Student
• Educational Leadership Development and Learning Technologies
• Drexel University

An undergraduate service-learning course was the catalyst for Stephanie Budhai's personal and professional interest in service-learning. As an education major at Temple University, Budhai completed a course designed to provide pre-service teachers with the skills needed to implement a service-learning project while simultaneously participating in such an experience. The impact of this experience has proved to be invaluable as it has shaped her passion for community engagement scholarship.

Through her experience with service-learning, she has not only gained a thorough understanding of the role of community in service-learning projects but has also developed the desire to examine these roles. Budhai has worked with community-based mentoring programs as well as conducted research on the experiences of community members involved in service-learning programs. She sees this topic as central to the community as there would not be any service-learning experiences without community-based organizations.

Presently, Budhai is an advanced doctoral student at Drexel University in the Educational Leadership and Learning Technologies program. In preparation for her dissertation, she is conducting a pilot study. Budhai interviewed representatives from community-based organizations who participated in university-sponsored, service-learning projects. Findings from this pilot study have been particularly informative for her dissertation given the dearth of research on service-learning from the perspective of community partners. Budhai's future career goals include both becoming a faculty member and a university administrator in a civic engagement or service-learning office. In both roles, Budhai plans to engage community members in the scholarship process.

• Maria De Moya
• Assistant Professor
• Communication
• North Carolina State University

Dr. Maria De Moya is a new assistant professor at North Carolina State University's Department of Communications. Originally from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, she holds a B.A. in Social Communication from Santo Domingo Catholic University in the Dominican Republic; an M.A. in Business and Economic Reporting (Journalism) from New York University (where she was a Fulbright Scholar); and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the University of Florida. De Moya worked for over four years as a journalist, specializing in business and economics. More recently, she worked as a public relations specialist for the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, D.R. and in the United States Agency for International Development's mission to the Dominican Republic (USAID). At USAID, she was tasked with overseeing the communication interventions in support to the Agency's development programs and with raising the Dominican public's awareness about USAID's work in the country. Additionally, De Moya taught mass communications at the university level in the Dominican Republic, and most recently was a public relations instructor at the University of Florida. Starting Fall 2011, she is teaching public relations courses at NCSU.

As a mass communications scholar with a focus on public relations, De Moya's research interests are on how communications efforts can lead to community organizing, building and development. Her dissertation, titled "A Grounded Theory of Global Public Relations by Diaspora Organizations: Building Relationships, Communities and Group Identity" studied how community-based organizations serving diasporas use public relations to nurture a sense of community.

• Lina Dostilio
• Graduate Student
• Educational Leadership
• Duquesne University

Lina Dostilio is a graduate student and engagement administrator at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In these capacities, Dostilio supports and studies the scholarship of engagement. Her dissertation research investigates democratically engaged community-university partnerships. In addition to democratically oriented partnerships, Dostilio is interested in the theoretical foundations and use of the concept of reciprocity and has been coordinating a scholarly writing group that explores this topic. Her disciplinary training is through Education Foundations and Leadership, and as a result, Dostilio has cultivated a research interest in school-community-university partnerships. She serves on the Board of Directors for the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, is the chair of the Graduate Student Network for that Association, is an advisory board member for Pennsylvania Campus Compact, and has recently been involved with the Next Generation Engagement project through the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. Dostilio hopes to maintain a research agenda around engaged scholarship and partnership dynamics and to fill a hybrid faculty/administrative post in the future.

• Rebecca Foco
• Graduate Student
• School of Education/Health Promotion & Education
• Virginia Commonwealth University

Rebecca Foco is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her area of concentration is in health promotion and education. She is pursuing a faculty track position in health promotion. She plans to continue her work in community-based scholarship.

Her scholarly interests relate to the ways in which community-academic research partnerships are formed and sustained. Her dissertation is "The Role of Faith Leaders in Partnerships among Health Promotion Researchers and Faith Communities." It is a grounded theory exploration of the roles faith leaders may play in faith community-academic partnerships. The research aims to create a theory of the role of faith leaders in faith community-academic partnerships specifically from the perspective of faith leaders. Potential future expansions of this work include exploring the role of leaders in other types of communities that are engaged in health research partnerships and developing theory related more generally to faith community-academic partnerships for health research.

Foco serves as a research assistant on a federally-funded community-engaged research project, the Community Partnership for Ethical Research (CPER). CPER is a multi-faceted project focused on exploring methods for improving university-community partnerships for research. Foco has worked with community partners to develop tools for tracking the networks of community partners and educational materials for training future partners. Additionally, she has written manuscripts, coded and analyzed qualitative interview data, and contributed to other grant applications.

• Karen Foli
• Assistant Professor
• Nursing
• Purdue University

Karen J. Foli, Ph.D., RN, is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing, Purdue University, West Lafayette. Dr. Foli was recently selected to be part of the Community of Service Learning Faculty Fellows (CSLFF) at Purdue. In this role, she will assist in expanding and stewarding service-learning at the University. Her selection as a CSLFF was based on her three years of experience as coordinator of a senior-level nursing course that incorporates experiential learning via service-learning. She has connected groups of students with dozens of community partners while emphasizing student learning of management and leadership principles. As a principal investigator, she is currently conducting research that strives to measure outcomes related to service-learning: visitor survey data from a health fair planned and implemented by senior nursing students (completed study with submitted manuscript); and undergraduate nursing students' perceptions of leadership behaviors of self and peers (pre-and post-test) (ongoing study). Foli will also present in April at the RosEvaluation Conference at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology on "Service-Learning in a Service Oriented Profession" and will emphasize assessment and evaluation of student learning. Foli's goals include refinement of research designs in assessing the impact of service-learning from student, faculty, and community partner perspectives through mixed methods approaches. In addition, Foli conducts research surrounding the needs of those individuals whose lives have been touched by adoption.

• Jessica Gardon Rose
• Graduate Student
• Health Administration
• Central Michigan University

Jessica Gardon Rose is a hands-on healthcare administrator and project enabler with a record of success in clinical operations management and service administration. Her expertise is in community engagement, and she takes pride in her past work with expanding Detroit's Women's-Infants'-Children's nutrition supplement program and acquiring government grants for developing and coordinating a client referral assistance initiative in Detroit. A physician assistant with a master's degree in Clinical and Community Health Education, Gardon Rose is presently working on her doctorate in health administration at Central Michigan University (CMU). She has over 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry including hospitals, ambulatory care clinics, NGO agencies and managed care organizations, and presently serves as the director of Clinical Services overseeing CMU's Carls Center for Clinical Care and Education. Since coming on board in May 2008, her responsibilities at CMU quickly expanded to include supporting the College of Health Professions as the privacy officer and serving as the director of the Bridges Center for Healthy Life Transitions (www.chp.cmich.edu/bridges). With her additional involvement in the Center for Collaborative Leadership in Healthcare, Gardon Rose is a consultant for the Central Michigan District Health Department and works with county health improvement planning workgroups and the Together! We Can Health Improvement Advisory to establish a framework for collaborative leadership and effective project management.

• Jo Latimore
• Academic Specialist
• Fisheries & Wildlife
• Michigan State University

Dr. Jo Latimore is an academic specialist in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University. Her position is described as a Lake, Stream, and Watershed Management Outreach Specialist. After earning a doctoral degree in this department, she spent four years as a watershed ecologist for the Huron River Watershed Council in Ann Arbor. There she provided scientific support to aquatic volunteer monitoring/citizen science programs. Their Adopt-a-Stream program is one of the largest and most successful volunteer monitoring programs in Michigan, which led to its inclusion in the team contracted by the State of Michigan to implement the statewide aquatic volunteer monitoring program, the Michigan Clean Water Corps (MiCorps).

Partly due to Latimore's interest in expanding her scholarship in both engagement and ecological research, she returned to academia in her current position. She continues to be engaged with MiCorps as a program consultant, training volunteers, ensuring data quality, and assisting citizens and the state with applying monitoring data to resource management. Latimore is also very interested in mechanisms for empowering citizens and those responsible for making aquatic resource management decisions by increasing their scientific literacy and leadership skills. For example, she facilitates the Michigan Inland Lakes Partnership, a collaborative between 24 government agencies, educational institutions, and organizations with an interest in lake protection and management. She is also the coordinator of the Michigan Lake and Stream Leaders Institute, which prepares citizens to be informed and effective leaders of aquatic resource stewardship.

• Tiffany McDonald
• Graduate Student
• Communication Studies
• University of Denver

Tiffany McDonald is currently a second year doctoral student at the University of Denver in the Department of Communication Studies. Her research investigates how cultural identity and difference and place and space are transformed and reclaimed in community, with particular focus on the African American community. Guided by a critical race theoretical lens, she privileges decolonizing methodologies that are inherently critical in nature, rooted in community, and collaborative in process through praxis. Given these commitments, the career trajectory that McDonald envisions will bridge communities within and beyond academia in ways that are not only inclusive, but impactful. Regardless, she aspires to produce research that reflects a transdisciplinary focus, informing social justice action and/or policy implicative projects through community-based research.

McDonald's research examines how Community-Based Research, in particular, Participatory Action Research (PAR), might engage communities of color towards change that informs and ultimately shapes social policy. For example, in a recent independent study, McDonald blends theories of collaboration with critical and cultural theoretical insights to produce a theory of cultural brokers. She defines cultural brokers as individuals who do the work of face to face cultural translation within and between collaborative groups, stakeholders, agencies, and communities to ensure successful social policy development and implementation. Her hope is that, with the help of cultural brokers, the communities targeted and served will embrace the programs and services that aim to improve their quality of life and enhance their empowerment capacity.

• Paula Miller
• Graduate Student
• Sociology
• Michigan State University

Paula Miller is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University, specializing in racial inequality, gender, and social stratification. She is interested in how systems of stratification such as race, class, and gender play out in local spaces. Currently, she is researching how white identities and cultures interplay with gender and class in local spaces dominated by racial minorities.

She is also a reviewer and editorial board member for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, an intersectional journal dedicated to uncovering relationships of power and privilege and providing practical advice about strategies that can be used both inside and outside of the classroom to deconstruct these relationships.

Central to Miller's research approach is the tenet that academic work should be simultaneously theoretical and practical. She began work with the Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion, at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, in the Spring of 2010 as an outlet to ensure her research remains socially relevant.

In addition, she is a graduate student researcher on an NSF-funded evaluation project of informal science education, where she collaborates with community partners during all stages of the research process, from research design, instrument development, data collection, analysis, and dissemination to scholarly and practical audiences. Results from this project are expected in Fall of 2011 and will include socio-demographic variables such as race and gender.

Miller expects to graduate from Michigan State in 2014 and plans to pursue a tenure track position at a research university.

• Casey Mull
• Graduate Student
• Lifelong Education, Administration & Policy/Adult Education
• University of Georgia

Casey D. Mull serves as the Extension military specialist for the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. In addition to overseeing 4-H Military Programs and partnerships between the military and Cooperative Extension in Georgia, Mull holds a partial assignment to Headquarters, U.S. Air Force Airman & Family Services. His research interests include boundary spanners and organizational development, particularly within the context of community-military partnerships.

Through his research, Mull hopes to combine his undergraduate business degree from Wake Forest University and his Master of Public Administration from the University of Georgia to examine the role and use of contractors as boundary spanners as he completes his Ph.D. in Adult Education from the University of Georgia.

In his professional position, Mull has facilitated youth and adult military and civilian audiences in topics such as etiquette, protocol, organizational structure, and organizational culture to build understanding among civilian groups that serve military members and their families through the deployment cycle.

• Emily Nemeth
• Graduate Student
• School of Teaching and Learning
• Ohio State University

Emily Nemeth is a second year doctoral student at Ohio State University focusing in Adolescent, Post-Secondary and Community Literacies. Her scholarly interests include social class, high school to college transition, and engaged scholarship. In terms of research, she is currently assisting with a grant funded by the National Education Association, focused on working with K-12 teachers who are interested in implementing service-learning (SL) in their classrooms. Nemeth is also engaged in research at a local high school exploring college access issues facing first generation college bound students. Beyond her coursework and research interests, she tries to stay involved with local educational issues. She recently completed an internship with the Ohio Department of Education's School Funding Advisory Council, and she volunteers with I Know I Can, a local college access organization.

Prior to coming to OSU, Nemeth received her M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Higher Education with a focus in SL. During her time at UMass she worked with local community agencies to research community voice in SL partnerships, and she interned with Ohio Campus Compact to research the civic engagement practices of Ohio colleges. All of her experiences in and out of the classroom have contributed to her dissertation interest of engaging in community-based action research with low-income, first-generation, college-going youth and assisting them in matriculating into colleges or technical programs that best meet their needs. Upon the completion of her degree, Nemeth plans to pursue a faculty position focusing on adolescent literacies and college access.

• Kristine Ronan
• Graduate Student
• History of Art and Museum Studies
• University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Kristine Ronan is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. Working between the subfields of American and Native American art, Ronan focuses on how specific communities utilize visual culture to forge or retain distinct identities in the face of social and cultural crisis. Her dissertation, "Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image," follows an 1834 work by exploration artist Karl Bodmer as the image travels in both mainstream and Native communities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ronan completed her B.A. in American Studies, with a concentration in ethnic studies, at Yale University in 1999. Her post-college work and volunteer experiences in the arts often involved working with groups not generally a part of institutional art practices, including at-risk youth and communities living out the legacies of 1960s urban renewal. These experiences in professional and regional theater, film production, and museum education sparked Ronan's interest in art's potential for communities that have few resources to aid and strengthen social cohesion, identity formation, and personal growth in what can be difficult societal conditions. She is working toward her doctoral degree to gain the experience and training necessary to lead in either an academic or art institutional setting, with a particular focus on how the arts intersect with local communities. Ronan's additional research interests include the history and theory of film, modernism, print culture, photography, museum studies, and postcolonial theory.

• Timothy Shaffer
• Graduate Student
• Adult Education
• Cornell University

Timothy Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. His major field of study is adult and extension education, with minors in city and regional planning and community-based natural resource management.

Shaffer is currently part of a national research project exploring the roles Cooperative Extension and land-grant universities play in cultivating and sustaining democratic publics addressing contentious public problems. After completing his Ph.D., Shaffer intends to pursue a faculty position at a university or college engaging in teaching, research, and engagement focused on the study of higher education and the roles and relationships of academic professionals in community-based settings.

Community-university partnerships and engaged scholarship are important both in helping to define higher education institutions and their missions and in helping to build civic capacity within communities. Shaffer's research is focused on land-grant universities, with particular focus on Cooperative Extension, because of its explicit public mission. Shaffer is particularly interested in learning about the ways in which academic professionals work with—and not simply for—citizens, by redefining and reshaping the relationship between experts and citizens.

Previous experience with engaged scholarship includes various projects within the University of Dayton's Fitz Center for Leadership in Community. Professionally, Shaffer has functioned as the coordinator of two distinct programs at the University of Dayton: the Rivers Institute and the Graduate Community Fellows. He has also worked as a research assistant at the Kettering Foundation, focused on higher education's engagement and community-based research as it related to greater citizen participation in democratic life.

• Sandra Spoelstra
• Assistant Professor
• Nursing
• Michigan State University

During her doctoral studies, Dr. Sandra Spoelstra completed a dissertation titled, "Falls in the Community Dwelling Elderly with Cancer (2010)." During her preparation work for the dissertation, Spoelstra was able to complete two preliminary studies, both published. The intent of this work was to identify if the fall rate was higher in cancer patients. After obtaining these datasets, she found that the population was understudied, and the data could be used in multiple ways. Spoelstra worked with Dr. Charles Given to examine several aging topics and began to collaborate with the State of Michigan Long-term Care Division, serving 20,000 dually-eligible Medicare/Medicaid recipients living in the community. They are now focused on developing strategies to manage medications, prevent falls, and delay or prevent nursing home placement, thus reducing the burden of cost for the State of Michigan. Spoelstra is now an assistant professor at Michigan State University College of Nursing, where she continues to develop her community-based research.

• Jody Stark
• Graduate Student
• Music Education & Music Therapy
• Michigan State University

Jody Stark is a Ph.D. candidate in the Music Education Department in Michigan State University's College of Music. She is also the site director of Music Therapy Clinical Services at the MSU Community Music School in Detroit, and president of Creative Arts Therapies, Inc., a company she started in 1991 that provides contractual music, dance movement, and art therapy services to agencies throughout Southeastern Michigan. She has over 28 years of experience with various populations, including psychiatric, cognitively impaired, autism spectrum disorder, pre-primary impaired, at-risk children/youth, and hospice. Stark's entire career has been committed to community-based music therapy services. She aspires to serve as faculty in higher education, while continuing community-based clinical work and research. Her current research interests center around medical music therapy and psycho-oncology, including her dissertation research investigating the effect of group music therapy on mood, psychosocial well-being, and quality of life of breast cancer survivors. Stark was named the 2011 Educator of the Year for VSA Michigan: The State Organization on Arts and Disability.

• Julie Taylor
• Graduate Student
• Social Work
• University of Alabama

Julie K. Taylor is a doctoral student in the School of Social Work at the University of Alabama. Her current areas of interest include juvenile justice, social inequality, public policy analysis, and community organizing. Taylor received a Master of Social Work degree from Virginia Commonwealth University, with a concentration in administration, program planning, and policy analysis. As an MSW student, she worked with colleagues and staff at the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice and front line staff on a training needs assessment of mid-level management in Virginia's detention facilities. While at VCU, Taylor received the School of Social Work Leadership Award.

Taylor holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Policy & Community Service, a service-learning degree from Emory & Henry College. While an undergraduate student, she received the Public Policy & Community Service Senior Award for distinguished citizen service for community development in Southwest Virginia. Following graduation, Taylor was employed by the Appalachian Center for Community Service at Emory & Henry College as the coordinator of CAUSE (Communities Allied to Uplift Success in Education), a community-based initiative in which she worked with stakeholders to offer programs supporting children and youth.

Taylor recently co-authored the manuscript, "Exploring the potential for racial and gender bias in violations of probation petitions." The research was a collaborative effort between the researchers and a southern locality as part of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. She has presented research at various social work and criminology conferences. Prior to doctoral education, Taylor worked with the TN Administrative Office of the Courts as a court programs specialist. She has been involved in organizing efforts surrounding labor rights, peace education, preventing child abuse, access to justice, and building healthy communities.

• Jeena Williams
• Graduate Student
• Educational Leadership, Policy and Technology Studies
• University of Alabama

As a student in the Instructional Leadership program at the University of Alabama, Jeena Williams has research interests in exploring African American students' transition from high school to college. Based on her professional and personal lived experiences as an African American woman in higher education, Williams has observed that many African American students do not transition successfully into higher education. While working with pre-collegiate programs, she worked with middle school and secondary school students to help them successfully transition into post-secondary education. She noticed that many of these students did not have the information necessary to transition into higher education, could not process the information, and/or were first generation high school graduates.

Williams is interested in researching factors pertaining to African American student success. Presently, she is exploring the influence that social club membership has on adolescent African American girls' educational aspirations through administering a pilot study for dissertation research. Upon earning a Ph.D., she plans to secure a tenure track position in the field of education research or social foundations of education.

• Heng-Chieh Wu
• Research Associate
• University Outreach and Engagement
• Michigan State University

Heng-Chieh (Jamie) Wu, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research associate in the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative at Michigan State University. Her research interests focus on recreation impacts on youth development, the cultural aspects of leisure, and program evaluation. Serving as a co-principal investigator on a William T. Grant Foundation funded project, Dr. Wu has worked intensively with a community-based youth serving organization to evaluate the development and dissemination of an intervention model that aims to promote older teens' 21st century skills through program leadership and ownership. In collaboration with her advisor, Dr. Laurie Van Egeren, she submitted a grant proposal to the Spencer Foundation under the theme, "Strategic Initiatives: Civic Learning and Civic Action." The result of the grant will be announced in June 2011, with a proposed start date in July 2011, if accepted.

 

• Marissa Yandall
• Graduate Student
• Communication Studies & Critical Interpersonal Communication
• University of Denver

Marissa Yandall is currently finishing her third year of doctoral work as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Denver. Throughout the course of her masters and doctoral programs, Yandall has worked to integrate her efforts in service, research, and pedagogy in ways that expand and strengthen each facet of her scholarship. Beginning with her master's program, Yandall's passions in academia have been foregrounded by her interest and participation in the community and culture of sport. Although she had little knowledge in the beginning of how paradigm, epistemology, and method worked into research design and implementation, Yandall knew she wanted to make a difference through engaged, community-based research. Her thesis study on parent-child communication within youth sports exemplified her integrated approach. She interned with a youth sports program in addition to interviewing parent/child dyads. She then produced a pamphlet for the camp offering suggestions to parents for improving communication and relations within sport culture. This invaluable and rewarding experience set the course for Yandall's doctoral work, where she has been serving in the university athletic department and collecting data for her dissertation over the past year. Yandall plans to pursue a career at a Division I, public university where she can conduct engaged, participatory research; develop innovative curriculum that fosters social responsibility; and build partnerships and pathways between the university and related communities. She deeply values the potential of engaged research to empower and motivate individuals and communities toward enlightened and humane evolution.