Scholar of the Month

My passion for health equity was sparked by deeply personal experiences. Growing up, I witnessed how financial insecurity and limited health literacy shaped health outcomes in my family, including the premature loss of my grandmother and the tragic death of my baby sister. These experiences instilled in me a drive to make healthcare more equitable, transparent, and centered on patient needs. This personal mission has guided my path as a transplant hepatologist and physician-scientist.

I focus on addressing disparities in care for patients with chronic and end-stage liver disease. My research targets the social and structural determinants of health that contribute to inequities in diagnosis, treatment, and survival, particularly for Black, low-income, and marginalized patients. I develop multi-level, culturally tailored interventions that improve access to curative therapies like liver transplantation and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) treatment.

Locally, I’ve built interventions that support patients and providers at Indiana University and community clinics across the state, helping ensure more equitable access to liver transplant evaluation and cancer screening. Nationally, my work has influenced policy discussions around Medicaid expansion and been cited in leading publications. I am also honored to be a part of the committee working on the Lancet Commission on Liver Disease in the U.S.

I love working directly with patients and community providers to co-design solutions. They are thoughtful about solutions and shock me at the things that they come up with that I didn’t think about. It’s the human side of science that fuels my work.

I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling, gardening, and engaging in community wellness efforts, especially those that center Black women’s health and wellbeing. These moments keep me grounded and remind me why the work matters.

Students and trainees are at the heart of my work. I mentor medical students, residents, and early-career researchers, many from underrepresented backgrounds, helping them publish, design studies, and navigate careers in academic medicine. Several of my mentees have received prestigious awards and gone on to competitive programs.

Community members co-design many of our interventions and are active stakeholders throughout our research. We work with advisory boards composed of patients and local providers to ensure that our solutions are practical, respectful, and grounded in lived experience. Their insights shape everything from language used in educational materials to the logistics of care navigation.

My immediate next step is scaling up LiverLink, our three-part intervention for patients with liver cancer. I’m also launching a new research thread in cancer screening and to explore how chronic stress from social adversity affects biological outcomes in liver disease, bridging social science and biomarker research to uncover new pathways for intervention.