Latesha K. Harris ’20, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Nursing who has been selected to participate in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation leadership program. At Carolina, she is a participant in the Initiative for Minority Excellence, an initiative of The Graduate School’s Diversity and Student Success program.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a philanthropic organization dedicated to the advancement of healthcare equity. Harris will join the foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars program which particularly works to improve healthcare policy. The program selects students from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds, who can help shape healthcare in relation to the country’s constantly evolving demographics.
As a participant in the program, Harris plans to assess the associations between psychological stressors, structural racism and cardiometabolic health disparities among African-American women. This directly supplements her dissertation, of which she plans to looks at the relationship between police violence as a race-related stressor and cardiometabolic risk (CMR) among the same demographic.