INSIGHT Injury Training Research Program Intern

Company Name: Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center Internship

Dates Employed: Jun 2018 – Aug 2018

Employment Duration: 3 months

Location: Seattle, Washington, United States

VIEW MY PRACTICUM RESEARCH - Description of legal intervention homicide by victim mental health and substance abuse problems

• Awarded the 2021 Inaugural INSIGHT Alumni scholarship award for Outstanding Leadership.

• Worked collaboratively as a research assistant on a team of injury researchers from Harborview and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center to study 500+ incidents of legal intervention homicide in the United States.

• Qualitatively evaluated 500+ reports of legal intervention homicide cases in the National Violent Death Reporting System, and then quantitatively analyzed victim and incident characteristics in SAS.

• Identified potential problems with the codebook and recommended solutions to the research team.

• Conducted an individual research investigation titled, “Description of legal intervention homicide by victim mental health and substance abuse problems,” and presented findings to senior researchers, physicians, and surgeons at Harborview, the University of Washington, and at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

Retaliatory attitudes and the risk of dating violence aggression among youth and young adults presenting to an urban emergency department

• Designed, investigated, and authored a Master’s Thesis manuscript on the relationship between a young person’s willingness to endorse retaliation and their likelihood of dating violence aggression.

• Performed and extensive literature review to identify appropriate data sources.

• Quantitatively analyzed approximately 1500 individual survey responses from the dataset “Substance Use Among Violently Injured Youth in an Urban Emergency Department: Services and Outcomes in Flint, Michigan, 2009-2013 (Public Use)” in SAS.

READ MY THESIS (Unpublished)

Condom use for the prevention of STIs among students who do not rely on condoms as their primary for of contraception

This research analyzes the likelihood of college students who do not rely on condoms as their primary form of contraception to use a barrier method (e.g., condoms) to protect themselves against sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and determines the best predictors of condom use among the sample. We hypothesized that pregnancy is the main concern among sexually active adolescents, and that when risk of pregnancy is removed students are less likely to use a barrier method. Surveys of 203 students at a small, liberal arts college support what literature agrees are that the best predictors of condom use at last sex: perceived loss of pleasure by using condoms, perceived partner disapproval of using condoms, and ease of partner communication.

Published in Papers & Publications: Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 6 - READ NOW

Presented at:

• 2017 Southwestern Social Science Association Annual Conference in Austin, TX

• 2016 Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Conference in Seattle, WA

Epidemiology of Salmonella typhimurium in Caenorhabditis elegans under different environmental conditions

In this research, I modeled the transmission of a diarrheal disease among populations of C. elegans by exposing the nematodes to S. typhimurium under different environmental conditions. I modeled access to health services and population density in order to see how these aspects of the environment influenced the spread of S. typhimurium. After experimental populations were exposed to the Salmonella, the intestinal bacterial load of worms from each population was counted and compared. I found that, with some deviations, worms with the most access to health services had the lowest S. typhimurium bacterial counts, and worms in the highest population densities had the highest S. typhimurium bacterial counts. These results give insight into how these environmental factors may affect human health outcomes.