PhD in Public Health

Kim McNally becomes George Mason’s first PhD in public health

Taylor Thomas — Thu, 02 May 2024 15:50:40 +0000

Kim McNally becomes George Mason’s first PhD in public health Taylor Thomas Thu, 05/02/2024 - 11:50

��AV's College of Public Health started its new PhD in Public Health in 2021 with a cohort of six students. Just three and a half years later, Fairfax County Health Department School Nurse Kim McNally will be the program's first PhD to walk across the Commencement stage at EagleBank Arena this May.

By training the future public health workforce, including epidemiologists, nurses, nutritionists, health administrators, and social workers, George Mason’s College of Public Health—the first in Virginia—helps reduce the public health worker shortage, and its students and graduates help individuals and communities get healthy and stay healthy. Since the PhD program's inception, the college has accepted 27 students.

Kim McNally (center) with her mentors Professor Ali Weinstein and Professor Amira Roess. Photo provided

After receiving her bachelor's in social work from Rutgers University, McNally went to work in child protective services, ultimately deciding it was not for her. She went back to school, earning her bachelor's in nursing and master's in nursing education from Western Carolina University. After a year working in a hospital, she realized her love of public health, which led to her applying to George Mason’s brand-new PhD program in public health. McNally successfully defended her dissertation in April.

Throughout her studies, McNally continued to work full time as a public health school nurse for the Fairfax County Health Department as part of the School Health program, which provides schools with school health aides and public health nurses. Her current position as a school health nurse in Fairfax County has been instrumental to PhD goals.

McNally’s primary research during her PhD was looking at ways to improve HPV vaccine compliance, particularly among seventh graders. In fact, it was this goal that led her to getting her PhD in the first place:

“I really wanted to jump right in and do an intervention. But then I had to take a step back when I realized that we didn’t have the research to support developing one intervention over another. And so that’s where it started. [It] was just looking at a way to empower school nurses in particular,” said McNally.

As for what she plans to do now that she’s completed her degree, McNally still isn’t sure.

“I love my job,” she said. “It’s an amazing job. I work with amazing people so I would love to stay in school health.”

However, she also would like to work with schools and the health department to support school health nurses because the one thing she has heard over and over again is that school nurses are overburdened.

McNally is also very passionate about mobile health clinics. She says in the years she has been working in schools in Northern Virginia, she has never seen a mobile health clinic on a registration day or during an open house that offered the HPV vaccine and other immunizations required by Virginia state law for students in public schools.

As she looks toward Commencement this May, McNally said she couldn’t have reached her goals without George Mason and her mentors. McNally’s family, mentors, and well-wishers from the College of Public Health were in attendance as she defended her dissertation.

“Dr. [Amira] Roess [professor of Global Health and Epidemiology] has been my faculty mentor since day one and she’s been really amazing, really supportive. Guiding when guiding was needed but also letting me grow on my own,” McNally said.

She also took inspiration from her mentor Ali Weinstein, a professor in the Department of Global and Community Health, and how well she balanced the research aspect with the people aspect.

“We definitely need numbers and rates, but we also need to understand why people choose to vaccinate or choose not to vaccinate. I do feel like it definitely prepared me for my future goals," McNally said.

“I’m excited to see how Kim will continue to impact the fields of school nursing and public health,” said Roess. “She is a terrific role model for our current and future doctoral students.”

Adds Weinstein: “Her work is impactful and meaningful because of the combination of practical knowledge that highlighted a gap in public health practice.”

Learn more about the PhD in Public Health program here.

In This Story

Ali Weinstein, PhD

Amira Roess, PhD, MPH

Topics

PhD in Public Health

Public Health Students

Department of Global and Community Health

Child and Adolescent Health

vaccinations

School Nursing

Students

College of Public Health

Student Spotlight

Is AI more helpful than humans in health care?

Taylor Thomas — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:35:18 +0000

Is AI more helpful than humans in health care? Taylor Thomas Thu, 04/11/2024 - 09:35

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding to increase productivity and quality in both personal and professional settings, performing tasks previously thought only humans were capable of completing. Like other industries, health care is implementing this technology to enhance patient experiences and improve health outcomes, specifically using conversational agents like chatbots and AI-based conversational large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT. Conversational agent apps have been developed for personalized health coaching, blood pressure monitoring, medication reminders and motivational coaching for healthy eating and physical activity to name a few.

The eHealth market relies on a direct-to-consumer business model that avoids costly regulatory compliance studies that assess their effectiveness. Chatbot apps offer the potential to improve consumer uptake and treatment adherence leading to a stable business revenue base. However, research conducted by Public Health PhD candidate Kevin Cevasco and colleagues concluded that despite popular claims, there is not enough evidence to conclude chatbots have better patient uptake and adherence than non-chatbot apps, such as in addressing anxiety and depression care.

“It is unclear if chatbots improve patient experiences or if trends to include chatbots in electronic health applications are due to technology hype cycles and pressures to innovate,” said Cevasco. “The real impact of chatbot-enabled applications is largely unknown.”

Cevasco and team reached these conclusions after conducting a systematic literature review and meta-analysis which sought to confirm if publications proclaiming the efficacy of electronic health (eHealth) chatbots provide measures for user engagement, adherence, and working alliance.

“We selected studies where chatbot applications were patient-facing with health education, monitoring, or treatment-related purposes. We selected studies with primary measures that were focused on the user’s health outcomes and engagement with the applications,” said Cevasco.

After thorough screening, Cevasco and team discovered that there are very few randomized controlled trials on eHealth chatbot applications. From the small sample of publications available, the documented evidence suggests that patient engagement with chatbot eHealth applications is not conclusively better than human interventions or apps without conversational agents.

“The small number of studies available suggests researchers should include methods for measuring patient uptake, engagement, and working alliance in their ongoing conversational agent research.”

Despite the few research studies that support the claims of AI’s effectiveness in health care settings, Cevasco and colleagues’ work expands on the future implications of the clinical applications of LLMs. Currently, 50% of patients do not adhere to their prescribed medication regimens, and Cevasco is optimistic about the potential for AI to improve patient care if developed and implemented correctly.

“Although chatbots have the potential for improving personalized medicine by increasing health literacy and providing easily available and understandable health information, it is important the applications have the capacity to address the complexity of different health challenges,” said Cevasco

Contributing authors include College of Public Health MPH in Epidemiology alumna Rachel Morrison, PhD in Health Services Research student Rediet (Redd) Woldeselassie, and Seth Kaplan, professor of Psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“Patient engagement with conversational agents in health applications 2016-2022: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis" was published online April 10, 2024, in the Journal of Medical Systems.

Topics

digital innovation

Patient Experience

PhD in Public Health

public health research

Tech Talent Investment Program (TTIP)

Artificial Intelligence

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in menstrual products including tampons, pads, and liners

Mary Cunningham — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 16:18:54 +0000

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in menstrual products including tampons, pads, and liners Mary Cunningham Fri, 12/15/2023 - 11:18

In This Story

Anna Pollack, PhD, MPH

Joanna Marroquin, a Mason PhD in Public Health student

The average menstruator will use more than 11,000 tampons or sanitary pads in their lifetime. Vaginal and vulvar tissue that touch pads and tampons is highly permeable. Through this permeable tissue chemicals are absorbed without being metabolized, which makes endocrine-disrupting chemicals potentially dangerous when found in menstrual products. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can interfere with human hormones and cause medical issues, including gynecological conditions such as endometriosis and uterine fibroids.

��AV researchers Joanna Marroquin, a PhD in Public Health student, and Anna Pollack, an associate professor in the College of Public Health, reviewed studies conducted since 2103 that measured chemicals in menstrual products and that measured human biomarkers of chemical exposure and determined that endocrine-disrupting chemicals were found in menstrual products including tampons, pads, and liners.

“Identifying chemicals in menstrual products that menstruators regularly use is important because exposure through these products can impact menstruators’ reproductive health,” said Marroquin, the paper’s first author.

Associate Professor Anna Pollack

The study found that menstrual products contain a variety of endocrine-disrupting chemicals including phthalates, volatile organic compounds, parabens, environmental phenols, fragrance chemicals, dioxins and dioxin-like compounds.

This issue is even more relevant thanks to the Robin Danielson Menstrual Product and Intimate Care Product Safety Act of 2023, which was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2023. The Act would establish a program of research regarding the risks posed by the presence of dioxins, phthalates, pesticides, chemical fragrances, and other components in menstrual products and intimate care products.

This literature reviewed 15 papers published between 2013 and 2023 that tested menstrual products in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The researchers note that there are few publications available that measure chemicals in menstrual products.

Additionally, though forever chemicals (PFAS) have been found in menstrual underwear, there is a lack of peer-reviewed research on menstrual underwear and other newly-popular-in-the-U.S. products such as menstrual cups and discs.

Chemicals in menstrual products: A systematic review was published in BJOG, an international journal of obstetrics and gynecology in September 2023. Additional authors include Marianthi-Anna Kiomourtzoglou from Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and Alexandra Scranton from Women's Voices for the Earth.

The research was supported by Pollack's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences R01ES31079 award.