Leadership
CHET Director: Nancy Schoenberg, PhD
Dr. Schoenberg is the Marion Pearsall Professor of Behavioral Science (College of Medicine) and associate vice president for research on health disparities. A medical anthropologist and gerontologist, she focuses on improving health equity through community-based participatory research approaches, with a specific emphasis on the prevention and control of chronic conditions. In partnership with community members, this research involves developing, administering, and evaluating community-engaged health promotion and disease prevention interventions. Dr. Schoenberg founded the Faith Moves Mountain community-based research organization in 2004 and has worked with rural residents to undertake rigorous, innovative RCTs.
She has served as PI or co-PI on the following NIH grants: “An Intergenerational CBPR Intervention to Reduce Appalachian Health Disparities”; ”Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment"; “An Appalachian Cervical Cancer Prevention Project”, R01CA108696, N=460); ”Faith Moves Mountains: A CBPR Appalachian Wellness & Cancer Prevention Program”; and Patient Navigation for Cervical Cancer in Appalachia. She currently leads several research projects including “Community-engaged Research & Action to Reduce Respiratory Disease in Appalachia”; “Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment (Appal-TREE): Advancing Sustainable CBPR Interventions to Improve Healthy Diet in Rural Appalachian Children”, "Community to Clinic Navigation to Improve Diabetes Outcomes., and “Implementing an evidence-based mHealth energy balance intervention for a rural, Appalachian population. Reflecting her passion for research professional development, she is a MPI on a new postdoctoral training grant (1 T32 CA261786), “Addressing Rural cancer Inequities through Scientific Excellence (ARISE).”
She and her colleagues have published over 150 peer reviewed publications in diverse, interdisciplinary journals. She has served as primary research mentor for over 50 junior colleagues, is a standing NIH study section member, serves on three editorial boards, regularly provides visiting lectures at the National Institutes of Health, served as the associate dean for research in the UK College of Public Health, and was the associate editor of The Gerontologist for six years.
CHET Associate Director for Dissemination and Outreach: Carrie Oser, PhD
Dr. Carrie Oser is a University research professor and the DiSilvestro Endowed Professor in the department of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Center on Drug & Alcohol Research (CDAR) at the University of Kentucky (UK). As CHET’s associate director for dissemination and outreach, her goal is to foster the growth of collaborative research-oriented relationships with faculty and students across UK’s campus and with community partners to promote health equity in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Dr. Oser is passionate about conducting rigorous high-impact research to improve the lives of individuals with substance use disorders, especially among underrepresented populations. She has been continuously funded as a Principal Investigator (PI) for over a decade by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on six awards totaling more than $7 million examining addiction health services, health disparities, HIV interventions, social networks, implementation science, as well as substance use among rural, African American, and/or criminal justice populations. She regularly collaborates on interdisciplinary substance use research projects and has served as a Co-Investigator on 14 other NIH studies totaling over $100 million.
She is leading the GATE study (https://gate.uky.edu/, R01-DA048876) examining how social networks influence a person’s decision to initiate medication for the treatment of opioid use disorder in prison and post-release in rural versus urban counties. Dr. Oser is also a site PI the multisite SPECS study (https://www.specsstudy.com/, R01-MD013573) in Kentucky, Florida, and North Carolina exploring knowledge, attitudes, and use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among people on community supervision. She is a Co-Investigator on the landmark HEALing Communities Study (https://www.healingcommunitiesstudy.org/sites/kentucky.html, UM1-DA049406), overseeing partnerships between community coalitions and criminal justice agencies to deploy evidence-based practices to reduce opioid overdose deaths and contributing to UK’s implementation science and administrative cores. Dr. Oser has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles and received numerous awards for her mentorship of more than 50 graduate students and junior faculty.
CHET Manager: Ariel Arthur
Ariel Arthur is a passionate, engaged public health professional with a focus on issues of equity and justice. She graduated from The George Washington University in May 2014 with a Bachelor's in Biological Sciences and a minor in Public Health. While in college she developed a keen interest and commitment to eliminating barriers to optimal health for marginalized and disadvantaged communities, and chose to pursue a career in health equity. Ariel worked for over three years as a Health Policy Analyst with the Kentucky Department for Public Health’s Office of Health Equity to reduce inequities throughout the commonwealth, and in the Chronic Disease Prevention Branch addressing issues of asthma and colon cancer. She currently serves as the Manager of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at the University of Kentucky, whose mission is to synergize innovative, transdisciplinary and impactful research and training to improve the health of the most vulnerable residents of Kentucky and beyond. Ariel is a California native and has also lived in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Now that she calls Kentucky home, she enjoys working to ensure all populations she serves achieve the highest level of wellbeing.
CHET Associate Director for Research and Community Engagement: Lauren Whitehurst, PhD
Assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Whitehurst’s research seeks to define “good” sleep and how we can leverage it to support healthy cognition and combat disease and cognitive decline. The major themes of her work are centered around investigations of both central (e.g., electroencephalographic) and autonomic (e.g., electrocardiographic) indicators of sleep and their contributions to cognition. She also examines how stress-sleep interactions impact cognitive function and the importance of sleep to the development of accelerated or pathological cognitive decline (e.g., dementia/Alzheimer’s disease). She is particularly interested in how the lack of access to restorative sleep can play a role in creating or exacerbating disparities in cognitive health for communities historically underserved by science and medicine in the US. Lauren Whitehurst received her. BS in psychology and an MA in experimental psychology from James Madison University in 2011 and 2013, respectively. She completed her PhD in psychology from the University of California, Riverside in 2018 and completed her training as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Center for Health and Community and the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco in 2020.