I was honored to be invited to serve as a mentor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholars (HPRS) Lunch at the Academy Health Conference Annual Research Meeting in Seattle.  
 

HPRS, led by a team at Johns Hopkins University, cultivates transformational leaders who will inform and influence policy to build healthier and more equitable communities. To advance health equity, HPRS recruits doctoral students from a variety of nonclinical, research-focused disciplines in which policy is a key lever for change (e.g., urban planning, political science, economics, anthropology, education, social work, sociology) who are seeking to use policy to make meaningful advances in population health. These emerging researchers bring unique and diverse perspectives to their fields and are committed to advancing health and equity through their work.

Dr. Harold Pallock (a previous S4A grantee) and I served as the mentors at our table. 
At our table, we had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Jesse Brisbois, Isabella Castillo, Kelley R. Hollie, Aaron Mallory, Deanna Robertson, and Levia A. Sutton.

 

We got to hear about their research topics and a bit about who they are. What was evident was that all of them were choosing a topic they knew deeply, often through lived experience, empirical knowledge, and community knowledge. Their topics ranged from Autism training for Policy Departments and Nursing to Gun Violence and healing justice. 

Over lunch, we discussed networking, working with people with lived experience, and being from the communities we are researching. We talked about what it is like to have a stake in the research we are conducting, to be both an academic and from the populations academia calls hard to reach. We discussed how our research topics become entangled with our identities when we come from the communities we are partnering with. How that sometimes can make receiving any critism/ feedback feel personal in academia.  We talked about navigating the post-research world and translating your academic work into policy. 

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Both Dr. Pallack and I spoke about how we both had journalism backgrounds. Dr. Pallock spoke about the many op-eds he has written and how his style of academic writing isn't much different from how he writes his op-eds. He suggests that your academic writing should still be very accessible. That it still needs to feel authentic to you. 

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I spoke about being part of a movement called Pass The Mic.  Pass The Mic was created to fill the gap in how many women of color where represented in media as experts in their field. I spoke about being asked to help translate international housing policy and discuss this on the BBC radio. How when I write, I picture writing to my family, who sometimes I am not sure they really know what I do for a living, but they should be able to understand what I am saying in an article. 

The lunch was easy and relaxed, the conversation flowing in that way it does when people are genuinely curious about each other’s paths. Hearing how Dr. Pallock and I each found our way into this work reminded me that lives rarely unfold in straight lines. And yet, somehow, all those twists brought us to the same table, intersecting for a moment that felt both unexpected and exactly right.

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