Description:

Please mark your calendars for our April Current Issues in LGBTQ Health lecture, featuring ISGMH faculty Cindy Veldhuis, PhD. Veldhuis will speak on her paper, Doubly Marginalized: Addressing the Minority Stressors Experienced by LGBTQ+ Researchers Who Do LGBTQ+ Research

Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Time: 12:00 - 1:00pm Central Time

Location: 

625 N. Michigan Avenue

Suite 1400, Stonewall Conference Room

Chicago IL, 60611

This is a hybrid event. Guests may register to join in person or virtually. Lunch will be provided for in-person guests who register by Friday, April 12th.

About:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary, and queer people (LGBTQ+) experience significantly higher levels of stressors due to discrimination, stigma, and marginalization than do cisgender heterosexual people. These high levels of stressors have impacts on health and well-being as well as career impacts. Limited research suggests that within higher education LGBTQ+ faculty experience bullying, discrimination, and harassment within the workplace. There is also data to suggest that research on marginalized populations is perceived to be less objective and valuable than research on majority populations. Research on the challenges of being a member of a marginalized population who conducts research on the same population suggests potentially negative career and personal impacts. There has been little to no research on the double marginalization related to being an LGBTQ+ researcher doing research within the LGBTQ+ community. To describe the potential impacts of being an LGBTQ+ researcher who does LGBTQ+ research, Dr. Veldhuis applies the extant literature on marginalized researchers who do research among marginalized populations to LGBTQ+ researchers. She also describes the potential minority stressors that LGBTQ+ researchers may face and how that may impact careers. Finally, she offers multiple recommendations for improvements for the research community and argues that senior faculty, leadership, and mentors can take specific actions to lessen stressors for LGBTQ+ researchers studying LGBTQ-related topics.

About the Speaker: 

Dr. Cindy Veldhuis (pronounced Veld-hice) is an NIH-funded (NIH R00) Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine and in the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University (funded by an NIH F32) and received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her masters (Cognitive Psychology) and bachelors (double major: Theater and Psychology) from the University of Oregon. Broadly, her research focuses on LGBTQIA+ women’s intimate relationships and health as well as violence, trauma, mental health, and the impacts of sociopolitical events and large-scale stressors on wellbeing. She was recently awarded the Early-Stage Investigator award from the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office at the NIH. She is chair of the Science Committee of the American Psychological Association’s Division 44 (the division focused on LGBT populations).