AAHE is proud to present the 2009 Will Rogers Institute Fellowship to Karissa D. Horton. Ms. Horton is currently a doctoral candidate in Behavioral Health at the University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Horton’s previous degrees, Master of Arts in Health Education and Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology were also earned at the University of Texas at Austin. She is serving as a Graduate Research Assistant on Vocational Student Tobacco Use funded by the National Cancer Institute at the University.
Karissa has already begun making professional presentations at the Scientific Study of Religion on several occasions. Poster presentations have been made at the 2009 National Conference on Tobacco or Health, American Public Health Association and others. She has co-authored peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Pastoral Psychology and the Journal of Research on Adolescence, with four manuscripts in preparation.
Ms. Horton has received the Teresa Lozano Long Fellowship in Education and the Alexander Caswell Ellis Graduate Fellowship in Education from the University of Texas. She is a member of Kappa Delta Phi, International Honor Society in Education. Karissa currently serves as Vice President of the Health Education Student Association and is a member of the Student Technology Advisory Committee at the University of Texas. She also volunteers with the University of Texas Longhorn Alumni Band.
In her own words, “My research interests include health disparities in underserved populations, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between perceived racial discrimination stress and tobacco use. In particular, I examine the factors that may prevent individuals experiencing racial discrimination from engaging in tobacco use as a coping mechanism to deal with their stress. Some of the specific protective factors that I examine include religion, spirituality, social support, and social connectedness … It is my hope that through my efforts and my research we can gain new insights into both the predictors and protective factors associated with tobacco use among populations that are often under-represented in tobacco and lung health research.”
For more information about AAHE, please visit www.aahe.org/AAHE.
|
