Two SPH Faculty Win UIC Research and Scholarship Awards
Introduction
Each year, the UIC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Office of Technology Management announce UIC Research and Scholarship Annual Award winners. These awards recognize the efforts of faculty researchers, scholars, and others who advance knowledge and promote continued excellence at UIC. Five UIC early-career faculty who have shown outstanding promise to become future leaders in their fields receive annual Rising Star Awards. This year, SPH researchers Leslie Williams and Uchechi Mitchell both received Rising Star Awards–the first time in UIC history that two researchers from the same college have won awards in the same year.
Leslie Williams: Addressing the stigma of substance use disorder
In fifth grade, Leslie Williams read the 1980s autobiography of Ryan White, a 13-year-old Indiana resident whose story of contracting HIV through a blood transfusion and facing discrimination when he returned to school helped galvanize public education about HIV and AIDS and the fight against the disease.
Williams was so moved by White’s experience of being ostracized by his community that she wanted to learn more about the social stigma surrounding the disease. Years later, as an undergraduate at The Ohio State University in 2006, Williams traveled to South Africa for a short study abroad focused on South African history, policy and culture. She learned about barriers to HIV care by visiting an orphanage for children whose parents had died of HIV.
These experiences led her to pursue a doctorate in psychology and social intervention from New York University. From there, her career focus was clear: she would conduct global research in public health.
“I believe that quality health care is a human right, and that it applies to all people no matter what kind of health challenges or issues they have,” Williams said.
In 2019, she joined UIC as an assistant professor in community health sciences at the School of Public Health. Most of her research focuses on addressing stigma associated with HIV and substance use disorder and the barriers to health care those stigmas create. Williams’ interest in substance use disorder and the stigma surrounding it stemmed from her interest in HIV.
“People who inject drugs are disproportionately impacted by HIV and, in addition, people who use drugs are also very stigmatized in societies all over the world,” Williams said.
Last year, Williams received federal grant awards totaling $6.9 million to test the efficacy of two intervention projects to reduce stigma and increase social support for people with HIV or substance use disorder, through connections with their peers. Those aims, in turn, could increase access to care and potentially save lives.
Roughly half the total funding came from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a trial of an expanded social network approach to HIV testing in South Africa. Williams designed this intervention to help increase access to HIV testing for anyone reluctant to get such a test due to stigma. Her project even got the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which invited her team to submit a funding proposal to expand their work in South Africa.
In Chicago, and with a $3.7 million award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Williams developed a peersupport intervention to reduce the risk of opioid overdose among older adults on the West Side, where there have been high rates of fatal overdose among older men. The aim is to reduce substance use stigma and increase social support for people who use drugs while also teaching their friends and families how to help them access services that could prevent overdose, and how to administer naloxone to reverse overdose.
As a result of her research, Williams hopes to answer whether having peers communicate more about stigmatized health conditions can reduce stigma enough to meaningfully remove it as a barrier to health services.
“When I hear about people being denied care and/or dignity as they deal with health challenges, this continues to drive me to being an advocate for and creating change for them,” Williams said.
Uchechi Mitchell: Detecting if racial inequities make people age faster
What does effective health education look like in communities that don’t have public spaces to exercise or healthy food to eat?
Uchechi Mitchell was working as a community health corps member with the National Health Service Corps when she first asked that question. She was teaching older Black adults with diabetes about healthy eating and exercise when she realized it wasn’t a lack of information keeping them from reaching their health goals; it was a lack of easily accessible and high-quality spaces for engaging in these healthy behaviors.
Because she wanted to learn more about why Black communities lacked these spaces and what could be done about it, after her year of service she changed her own goal, from a career in pediatrics to one in public health.
Today, her research at UIC focuses on health equity and aging, particularly racial and ethnic health disparities that are influenced by stressors like discrimination and financial strain. Using data from a Health and Retirement Study, Mitchell and her team found acts of discrimination adversely affected cognitive functioning and that middle-aged Black adults experience faster declines in cognition compared to white adults. This finding is significant given research showing that Black adults have dementia rates more than twice the rates of white adults.
“I’m really trying to think through these pathways and processes that lead to health inequities as a means of trying to identify points of intervention,” Mitchell said.
In a study called “Hope, Purpose and Religiosity,” Mitchell and her colleagues examined whether these three factors could inform interventions to combat symptoms of depression among Black adults. What they found was that being hopeful and maintaining a strong sense of purpose in life protected against depressive symptoms for Black adults in mid-life and old age. They concluded that tailored interventions to foster hope and purpose in life may improve mental health among older Black people.
Mitchell has more than 30 published works, including in the Journals of Gerontology, Health Education & Behavior and Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.
Next, she wants to answer questions about how racial and ethnic minorities confront disparities in public health.
“We’re trying to understand what they are doing as a group, as a people, as a community, to weather the storms that they face and thrive in ways that maybe you may not expect,” Mitchell said. “There’s a shift in the political climate that could lead to the censoring of health inequity research. It might be temporary, but if we stop doing the work, then these health inequities will be permanent.”
Local and Global Research Impact (FY 25)
The University of Illinois Chicago is the only public R1 designated research university in Chicago. The School of Public Health has the 2nd largest research portfolio among UIC’s seven health sciences colleges.
- $38.8 M – incoming external award funds
- $37.7 M – annual research expenditures
- $2.8 M – research funds supporting student stipends and wages
- 136 grants submitted to request $108M in funding