The Duke Department of Pediatrics was recently awarded a Child Health Research Career Development Award (CHRCDA) from the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), entitled Duke Center for Advancement of Child Health (CAtCH). The first two scholars for the program have been selected, including Rushina Cholera, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Primary Care, and Victoria Parente, MD, MPH, assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Hospital Medicine.
Cholera will be evaluating cross-sector approaches to address social drivers of health among children in under resourced communities, under the mentorship of Ebony Boulware, MD, and Janet Prvu Bettger, ScD, FAHA. She received an MD and PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her NIH-funded PhD work focused on modifiable psychosocial barriers to healthcare engagement among HIV-infected people in South Africa. Since then, during residency and a National Clinician Scholars Program Fellowship, she has used mixed-methods, implementation research, and epidemiological approaches to examine the etiologies of health inequities from early childhood, aiming to develop community-driven interventions across the practice, policy, and health system levels.
Parente will focus on racial and ethnic disparities in communication quality between clinicians and pediatric patients’ family caregivers in the hospital setting, with mentorship from Kathryn Pollack, PhD. She received a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Stony Brook and completed her pediatric residency and chief resident year at Duke. Recently, she has benefited from a Duke REACH Equity Diversity supplement to study racial and ethnic disparities in clinician communication with families in the inpatient setting. Her career to date has been dedicated to reducing racial and ethnic health disparities through academic and advocacy efforts, including education of trainees, involvement in departmental committees, recruitment and mentorship of under-represented in medicine trainees, health disparities research, and community or institutional initiatives to reduce disparities.
Congratulations to these scholars and best wishes to them in their investigative work!