I’m fortunate to be the Elnora E. Thomson Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Nursing. I investigate the social contexts of family and unpaid caregiving, particularly for people and communities that have been historically underrepresented and underserved in health care research and services. My program of research focuses on how the informal, personal networks of family, friends, and close others provide caregiving and social support for people with chronic illness and at end of life. For the last decade, this work has explicitly included the experiences and outcomes of LGBTQIA+ patients and caregivers. I’m particularly interested in generating real-world, real-time understanding of social support resources and needs. Specifically, I hope to understand how we can help patients and family caregivers identify unmet social support needs, anticipate needs, and engage their informal and formal support systems by integrating longitudinal, naturalistic linguistic and audio data with insights about how their personal support systems/networks function now, and over time.

I’m privileged to mentor interdisciplinary researchers and scholars at all levels of development who are passionate about pursuing research careers at the intersections of social and health equity, caregiving, chronic illness, and end of life. Over the course of my career, I’ve served as dissertation chair, committee member, and/or mentor for more than 40 emerging and early career health scientists and scholars. My active and recent mentoring includes: a K01 NIA fellow investigating hospice providers’ elicitation and use of sexual orientation and gender identity data to improve tailoring of end-of-life care for LGBTQIA+ patients and caregivers; an NINR F31 fellow investigating associations between social network characteristics, obesity-related health behaviors, and weight retention among racially/ethnically diverse people who have recently given birth; an NINR F31 fellow investigating how adolescent siblings of children with cancer use social media within their social support networks; and an NCI Geographic Management of Cancer Health Disparities Program (GMaP) Region 6 Scholar conducting pilot work to examine differences in cancer care crowdfunding support among LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ cancer survivors. If you are interested in similar work, or in exploring potential collaboration, please check out my ORCID for most of my pubs, and feel free to contact me.