Current Fellows

 

Christopher Bosley, PhD
1st Year

 

Christopher Bosley is a medical sociologist and T32 National Research Service Award fellow in Primary Care Research at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chris is a former paramedic and firefighter, having completed a 20+ year career in emergency services prior to finishing his graduate level studies. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History with a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from Niagara University in Niagara Falls, NY and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy both in Sociology at The State University of New York at Buffalo. Chris’ experiences working in emergency services in Buffalo, NY and the surrounding Western New York area sparked his curiosities and study into the social determinants of stress and health, especially in high-stress jobs like emergency services.

Chris’ current research is centered on emergency medical services (EMS) topics. His dissertation examined 1) work-related stressors and their effects on different measures of health, 2) how the stress-health link varies by EMS providers employed in the public vs. private sectors, and 3) how informed coping and social support helps to mitigate some of the stress that working in EMS brings. Each of these studies from the dissertation are either already submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals or in the final preparation process for submission. While preparing his dissertation work for publication, Chris has received helpful feedback from his fellowship mentor at Sheps, Dr. Katrina Donahue, as well as his co-fellow Jeanna Campbell and Sheps faculty research fellow, Dr. Tania Jenkins.

Chris is currently conducting work on inequities in ambulance response time across the state of North Carolina. He aims to study whether variation exists in response time to 9-1-1 calls across different domains of inequity: rurality, poverty, and racialized residential segregation. The data for this study comes from the North Carolina Office of EMS, as a part of the National EMS Information Service (NEMSIS). Chris is also working with Dr. Lisa Zerden, Deputy Director of the UNC Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center, studying the implementation of behavioral health emergency competencies of the National EMS Education Standards into EMS curriculum across accredited EMS instruction programs in the United States. Lastly, Chris has also been pursuing a new research interest of his with Drs. Leah Ranney and Sarah Kowitt in the Department of Family Medicine, on a NIDA grant funded exploration of cannabis health warnings and labels. This project is studying the regulatory landscape across the cannabis industry from the perspective of State-level regulators. In this study, Chris has been assisting in the qualitative coding and thematic development from interview data of twenty interviews with cannabis regulators in different states in the US.

Research Interests: social determinants of health, stress and health, mental health, emergency medical services

 

Jeanna Campbell, PhD, MSW
1st Year

 

Jeanna Campbell earned a PhD in Philosophy of Social Work from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her three-manuscript dissertation applied syndemics theory to the deleterious relationships between structural violence and metabolism. In her research, Dr. Campbell identified the Diabetes, Obesity, and Economic Social Exclusion (DOSE) Syndemic among a nationally representative sample. As a form of structural violence, economic social exclusion led to worse diabetes outcomes, including increased diabetes prevalence, among Black non-Hispanic, and Hispanic women living with obesity in the United States.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Campbell contributes to interventions addressing the negative impacts of different forms of structural violence on metabolic health. Including community-informed multilevel level and culturally tailored interventions delivered in primary health care centers. The interventions support the metabolic health of low income and rural patients by addressing social (e.g., interpersonal and organizational social support) and dietary needs and preferences.

Dr. Campbell is a recipient of the All of Us Data Fellowship hosted by the National Institutes of Health, and Emerging Leader with the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Dr. Campbell is trained in analytical methods for handling multi-level and biomarker data. Her future research aims to intervene in the pathogenesis of diabetes and obesity, and related comorbidities such as kidney disease, among adults with low income by incorporating adaptive multilevel interventions tailored to meet specific subpopulations’ needs.

Research Interests: Social determinants of metabolic health; community-informed, culturally tailored, multilevel, and adaptive interventions