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, with a focus on research professional development. Dr. Schoenberg also serves as associate director of UK’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. A medical anthropologist and gerontologist, her expertise as a health equity researcher converges in two areas, community-engaged randomized behavioral trials and research training. Her community-engaged research addresses the prevention and control of chronic conditions among rural residents and other underserved populations. She focuses on the contextual underpinnings and lifestyle factors that elevate the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. In collaboration with diverse communities, she and her team design, implement, and disseminate culturally appropriate interventions. With continuous NIH support since 2000, Dr. Schoenberg has served as a PI or MPI on the following projects: “Patient Navigation for Cervical Cancer in Appalachia” (R01 CA120606); ”Faith Moves Mountains: A CBPR Appalachian Wellness & Cancer Prevention Program” (R24 MD002757); the first known Appalachian faith-based RCT for cancer screening (“An Appalachian Cervical Cancer Prevention Project”, R01 CA108696); “An Intergenerational CBPR Intervention to Reduce Appalachian Health Disparities” (R01 DK081324); ”Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment (Appal-TREE)” (R24 MD008018); “Community-engaged Research & Action to Reduce Respiratory Disease in Appalachia” (R01 ES024771); “Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment (Appal-TREE): Advancing Sustainable CBPR Interventions to Improve Healthy Diet in Rural Appalachian Children” (U01 MD010556). She currently leads two R01 community-engaged randomized behavioral trials (R01 HL152714 and R01 DK112136) that deploy implementation science approaches, Community Health Worker protocols, and technology. She regularly provides peer review for the NIH, consults on behavioral research initiatives across the nation, and oversees, and serves on three editorial boards.
Developing the evidence base for effective research training, particularly among trainees underrepresented in research and/or focused on disadvantaged populations, constitutes a second component of Dr. Schoenberg’s health equity career. Having served as a PI, MPI, or co-investigator on eight training grants, as a mentor to numerous NRSA and K awardees, and as a faculty mentor to over 60 pre and postdoctoral trainees or junior faculty members, she aims to nurture and enhance research development. Professional publications and presentations provide evidence of her commitment to mentees; over the past 25 years, Dr. Schoenberg’s mentees have co-published over 200 presentation abstracts and peer reviewed articles and chapters, often times taking first authorship. She has served as a PI, faculty member or lead mentor for T32 programs, NSF career development awards, K awards, F awards, and others, including “Addressing Rural Cancer Inequities through Scientific Excellence”(ARISE, T32 CA261786).
CHET Associate Director for Dissemination and Outreach: Carrie Oser, PhD
Dr. Carrie Oser is a University research professor and the Di Silvestro 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, 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 (SUD), 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 $7.3 million examining underrepresented populations of persons who use drugs (e.g., individuals involved in the criminal legal system, women, rural residents, and Black Americans) in a variety of areas including SUD/HIV interventions, addiction health services, social networks, and implementation science. She regularly collaborates on interdisciplinary substance use research projects and has served as a Co-Investigator on 14 other NIH studies totaling over $137 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. She is currently a Co-Investigator on five other NIH-funded projects, including the landmark HEALing Communities Study (https://www.healingcommunitiesstudy.org/sites/kentucky.html, UM1-DA049406), overseeing partnerships between community coalitions and criminal legal system 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 150 peer-reviewed articles and received numerous awards for her mentorship of more than 50 graduate students and early-career faculty.
CHET Manager: Ariel A. Arthur, MPH
Ariel Arthur is a passionate and engaged public health professional with a focus on issues of equity and justice. She is committed to advancing impactful strategies to ensure everyone has an opportunity to attain an optimal level of wellbeing. Working at the intersection of public health research and practice, she strives to share power and resources with community members in order to understand health inequities in the context of lived experience and historical injustices. As an experienced public health professional, Ariel collaborates with diverse partners to advocate for equitable policies that support positive community health outcomes. She believes that the wellbeing of a society’s women and children is a primary marker of success, and is committed to addressing the role systems of oppression play in adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes, particularly for Black women in the U.S. To this end she has contributed to research, education, mentorship, and professional development focused on maternal morbidity and mortality inequities in Kentucky.
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 disparities in asthma and colon cancer. She currently serves as the inaugural 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. She leads and executes the center’s programming and provides administrative oversight for training, communication, internal research awards, and philanthropy efforts. She also serves as the diversity, equity, and inclusion coordinator in the department of behavioral science where she supports research training and enrichment activities.
Ariel graduated from The George Washington University in May 2014 with a BA in Biological Sciences and a minor in Public Health, and received an MPH in Health Behavior from the University of Kentucky in May 2024. She was born and raised in California 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 well-being.
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.