Speakers:
Tora Johnson, PhD, Director, Geographic Information Systems Service Center, Associate Professor of GIS University of Maine Machias
Katherine Weatherford Darling, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Social Science Program, University of Maine, Augusta
About the seminar: Downeast Maine is a hub for collaborative community partnerships and community-engaged research and teaching to address health and social inequities. In this talk we report lessons learned and emerging findings from the Downeast Health Research Collaborative (DHRC) based at University of Maine Machias. DHRC is an informal network of students, faculty and community organizations working to address rural health inequities through community-engaged research, systems-level interventions and workforce development. Current pilot projects include research with workers in the shellfish and lobster industry on structural factors in injury, pain and addiction, research with the Maine Community Health Worker Initiative to strengthen the frontline public health workforce, research to reduce travel burden and prevent Emergency Department over-utilization, and research to map local assets and create an early intervention program serving rural youth experiencing serious mental illness.
About the speakers:
Tora Johnson has taught marine, environmental, and geographic information systems (GIS) at the college level since 1996. She teaches GIS and environmental studies at UMM and serves as director of the GIS Laboratory and Service Center and as chair of the Environmental and Biological Sciences Division. Before her son was born in 1996, Tora made a career of teaching and crewing aboard several of the large sailing vessels that ply the coast of New England, as well as commercial fishing in Alaska. Read more
Katherine Weatherford Darling is a sociologist working across the boundaries of medical sociology, feminist science studies, public health and bioethics. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the UMA Social Science Program and affiliated at University of Maine Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering and the Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation at Maine Medical Center Research Institute. She also serves on the Ethics Advisory Board at Northern Light Health Eastern Maine Medical Center and co-coordinate the Health Equity Dialogues.
Courses taught include ethics, politics and social dimensions of health, healthcare and biomedicine, with specific attention to race, class, gender, disability and intersecting social inequities. Read more
This event is free but registration is required