BSPH student receives research award at national health disparities conference
| December 18, 2012 | |
Madhu Vulimiri
Madhu Vulimiri, a junior health policy and management major at Gillings School of Global Public Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won a first-place award for her diabetes research at the sixth annual National Conference on Health Disparities, held in Little Rock, Ark., Nov. 28 – Dec. 1. The theme of the conference was “Reducing Health Disparities through Sustaining and Strengthening Health Communities.”
Vulimiri presented her poster, “Patient and Provider Perspectives of Community-based Health Promoter-led Diabetes Intervention,” which was developed through semi-structured interviews with patients and providers. Her aim was to better understand how diabetes health promoters (a type of community health worker) can improve delivery of diabetes care.
“I worked closely with my adviser, Dr. Morris Weinberger, to draft the abstract and design a poster for the conference,” she said. “He gave me great advice and feedback on how to make an effective poster.”
Vulimiri was awarded first place in the undergraduate student category and received $500.
“Through attending the conference, I learned that health disparities are a fight about how we live,” Vulimiri said. “We have a social responsibility to understand community priorities and bring them back to our schools, organizations and agencies. At their root, health disparities exist when an individual’s zip code can affect his or her health outcomes more than genetic code.”
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