Research Professor Kimberly Arcoleo honored for ‘excellence in maternal and child health leadership and advocacy’
University of Rhode Island College of Nursing Research Professor Kimberly Arcoleo has been selected to receive the American Public Health Association’s Distinguished Service Award, which honors “excellence in maternal and child health leadership and advocacy, effective practice, distinguished service, and significant contributions to the field.”
The American Public Health Association and the Maternal and Child Health Section distribute the awards annually to a handful of health care researchers. Arcoleo, who also serves as co-chair for program planning for the Maternal and Child Health Section, is one of eight to receive the honor this year during the APHA 2021 Annual Meeting and Expo on Oct. 25.
“Kimberly J. Arcoleo will receive the APHA MCH Distinguished Service Award for her dedicated, ongoing, and exemplary service to the MCH Section and APHA,” the organization wrote in its announcement. “She has provided key leadership in developing and finalizing activities and sessions aligned with the APHA themes and MCH priorities. Dr. Arcoleo’s outstanding work has led to a successful MCH Section program every year.”
Arcoleo, who holds a PhD in Health Services Research and Master’s in Public Health, has extensive experience designing, implementing, and managing large-scale intervention studies in the home, school and clinical settings. She has expertise in research design and methods, complex statistical analysis, comparative effectiveness research and analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis and regularly provides training and mentoring for graduate students and tenure-track faculty in these areas.
Her research focus is on closing the health disparity gap for low-income, under-served children with asthma. The over-arching, long-term objective of her program of research is to optimize children’s asthma health outcomes through evidence-based interventions at the child, family, school, and healthcare system levels with a focus on the role of culture in healthcare, mental health comorbidities, medication adherence, asthma education and case management, and use of telehealth for asthma management. She currently is Principal Investigator on a $2.27 million NIH-funded RO1 grant to evaluate a program that she’s been working on for several years with her clinician collaborators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH, titled “School-Based Asthma Therapy (SBAT) to Reduce Disparities in Childhood Asthma: Pragmatic Process and Program Implementation Evaluation.”