Q&A with Laura Limarzi, PhD student in Health Behavior
What factors influenced your decision to pursue your PhD at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health?
Laura Limarzi
- The Gillings’ ethos: I wanted to attend a school that is working to decolonize public health, including prioritizing efforts to identify similarities and differences between public health challenges and solutions globally, with the end goal of working respectfully and productively with colleagues from around the world to advance our collective efforts to achieve health equity.
- The Gillings’ faculty: I could not pass up the opportunity to be advised by Suzanne Maman and Vivian Go as co-mentors. Both Suzanne and Vivian have spent their careers conducting community-driven research to advance health equity, while maintaining and developing methodological expertise.
- The UNC/Chapel Hill communities: UNC and Chapel Hill are full of kind, humble people working on solving some of our world’s most pressing problems, who also value building community, being outdoors and having fun.
How has the time that you lived in Malawi prior to coming to UNC influenced your perspective on public health?
- How to follow: Our colleagues at UNC Project-Malawi work very hard to understand the priorities of the Ministry of Health and propose research topics that align to those priorities. Watching this dynamic over many years has taught me that strong links between policymakers and researchers are important for scale-up success of interventions, and has influenced some of my implementation science research interests as a result.
- Stay the course: It can take a long time to see the fruits of public health research, which can sometimes feel discouraging. It is important to look back on how far we have come in preventing and treating many diseases over time, find ways to enjoy the process, and keep optimistic about the future.
UNC Project-Malawi colleagues and Laura Limarzi at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences College of Medicine Dissemination Conference in 2018.
Can you tell us more about your current research?
My research is largely focused on implementation science at the intersection of infectious diseases and mental health, utilizing mixed methods approaches. I am a research assistant for HPTN 112, a systems navigation intervention for men initiating PrEP in Malawi, as well as a D43 Implementation Science training grant in Vietnam. I am so lucky to get to work with colleagues at both UNC Malawi and Vietnam who make our work together so enjoyable that it so often doesn’t feel like work.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your research, and how have you addressed them?
I often struggle trying to balance my desire to incorporate multiple elements of the social determinants of health into one research question, while maintaining a sufficiently narrow question to produce valid scientific results. I am working to find ways to better incorporate exploration of larger structural forces at play into discussion sections of papers, and have found support in colleagues who struggle in similar ways.
What are some of your favorite hobbies or activities to do in your free time?
My favorite ways to spend free time include: going for long walks in the forest with my dog and a good podcast, making impossibly fun memories with my nieces and nephews, and going to UNC sporting events with my husband 🙂
What is the most valuable piece of advice you have received and how has it impacted you?
Everyone who gives you advice is filtering it through their own lived experience. No matter how much they might try to empathize with your experience, they don’t fully know your unique context, talents and aspirations. So it is good to take pieces of advice with a grain of salt (including this one!).
Some of the UNC Project-Malawi staff in front of the Tidziwe building on the campus of Kamuzu Central Hospital.
On a hike with UNC Project-Malawi colleagues in Dedza.
