Description:

Candidate: Ha Ngan (Milkie) Vu, Ph.D. (she/her) NRSA T32 Postdoctoral Fellow 

Title: Community and stakeholder engagement in implementation science for health equity 

Abstract:

Community and stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential to ensuring the relevance, usefulness, and sustainability of evidence-based interventions. Building and maintaining community-academic partnerships, however, can be challenging, particularly for scientists aiming to improve the health of historically underserved populations. In this seminar, I will highlight my experience developing and strengthening community-academic partnerships and will discuss the ways in which engagement advances health equity in implementation science. I will describe several projects funded by the NIH and foundations that I conducted in partnership with community-based organizations in Georgia. These projects primarily focused on promoting cancer prevention among Asian Americans, immigrants, and refugees. In addition, I will discuss my current and future multi-disciplinary, collaborative research agenda, which employs community and stakeholder engagement to implement and sustain evidence-based preventive interventions in health systems and community settings to improve cardiovascular health behaviors and vaccine uptake.