A $137,565 grant from the National Institutes of Health will allow Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Professor Cassondra Marshall to advance the study of type 2 diabetes among Black and Latina women.
Dr. Marshall received the Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award from the NIH National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities on May 8, 2021. This award will allow her to achieve a long-term goal of advancing reproductive and maternal health equity through the translation of evidence into practice.
Type 2 diabetes, linked to maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, is increasing among women of childbearing age, with Black and Latina women disproportionately affected. Dr. Marshall hopes to develop new evidence-based strategies to create clinical guidelines for improving reproductive outcomes among this at-risk population.
“I am thrilled to receive this career development award that will further my training and equip me with the skills to develop, implement, and evaluate person-centered interventions to advance reproductive and maternal health equity,” said Dr. Marshall. The grant will also enable her to collaborate “with community health centers, which provide an excellent setting for this work focused on the understudied intersection of family planning services and chronic disease management.”
The grant will allow Dr. Marshall to train in person-centered and structurally competent reproductive health interventions, advanced mixed methods, implementation science and stakeholder engagement, and designing and implementing trials in the primary care setting. The research and training environments include UC Berkeley and close partners UCSF and Kaiser Permanente Northern California
She will also work with an interdisciplinary mentoring team, which includes Dr. Hector Rodriguez, health policy expert at Berkeley Public Health; Dr. Christine Dehlendorf family physician and professor at UCSF with advanced training in family planning; Dr. Margaret Handley, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UCSF; and UC Berkeley–trained health services and policy expert Dr. Julie Schmittdiel from the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.
This article was originally published on the Berkeley Public Health website.