University of Rhode Island College of Nursing\u2019s<\/a> newest assistant professor, Dr. Dahianna Lopez. From a very early age, Lopez faced challenges no young person should be forced to endure, challenges that could have easily held her down and derailed her dreams of making an impact on public health in society.<\/p>\n\u201cI come from a really severely underserved background,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cI was homeless at one point when I was younger. I was also a victim of domestic violence. I\u2019m an immigrant\u2014I was born in Mexico\u2014and as a woman and a person of color, it\u2019s been tough to navigate the world with the stereotypes there are about people like me. They\u2019re compounded and you walk around with these labels attached to you, so you\u2019re not always treated fairly. People like me have a lot of microaggressions thrown at them every day, and I\u2019ve learned to be resilient, to advocate for myself and to build a network of supportive people around me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the disadvantages she faced, Lopez overcame a difficult childhood and worked her way to some of the most prestigeous universities in the country, earning multiple degrees, including two master\u2019s degrees, a and a Ph.D. After establishing herself as a public health expert focused primarily on injury prevention, and alternating between academic research and implementation at the public health level, Lopez eventually landed as a tenure-track professor at URI in January 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that drew me to here at URI is that it has a lot of students that come from a background like mine,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cAnd I bring to this university the ability to connect with students and say to them, \u2018I know where you\u2019re at, I\u2019ve been where you are, and to some extent, I\u2019m still there.\u2019 Students will see a professor who has beat the odds, has worked really hard to achieve her dreams, and hopefully, students can say \u2018I can do the same thing. I can be that amazing nurse; I can be that professor; I can be whatever I want.\u2019 And if my story inspires students to dream big, I will feel accomplished.\u201d<\/p>\n
This semester, Lopez will be teaching community health nursing to undergraduate students, while continuing her research into injury prevention. She also plans to create a course on the subject. Read on for more about her experience and research focus.<\/p>\n
Education<\/strong>: Ph.D., Harvard University; M.S. in Nursing, University of California, Los Angeles; M.S. in Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles; B.A., University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\nExperience<\/strong>: Lopez comes to URI after a stint as a senior public health epidemiologist at the Rhode Island Department of Health, where she evaluated health-related initiatives of the Drug Overdose Prevention Program and determined their effectiveness, specifically dealing with opioid-related poisonings. She also worked for the City of Providence, where she Identified, interpreted, and recommended best practices and evaluation methods for public health interventions and programs. Previously, she served as Director of Injury Prevention for San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco; research associate for the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Nursing; patient health education coordinator for the Veterans Administration Hospital, Greater Los Angeles; and research associate for the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. In San Francisco and Boston, Lopez studied pedestrian and bicycle injuries, and was an advocate for transportation safety, helping transform those cities\u2019 transportation designs.<\/p>\nResearch focus<\/strong>: Lopez\u2019s research focus is on injury prevention, especially unintentional injuries sustained in transportation accidents, including car and bicycle crashes, and those from accidental poisonings. She examines injury prevention at the macro-public health level, looking at all aspects of an injury-causing event, not just the injury outcome. For example, when examining a car crash, an injury prevention specialist will examine not just the behavior of the drivers, but also the environment of the road, the engineering of the car, the safety features of a vehicle and whether they were effective in preventing injury, etc. \u201cI\u2019m not in a hospital or clinic working with individual patients; I\u2019m really looking at populations, and most specifically, I\u2019m looking at ways we use the science that we have to fix a problem,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cThere are numerous research studies that have identified effective solutions for preventing injuries. How do we then take the findings of these studies and apply them in the real world?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAny person from any background, with the right resources and the right support, can achieve a dream.\u201d While she acknowledges such a sentiment may sound corny to some, it is anything but a clich\u00e9 to the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing\u2019s newest assistant professor, Dr. Dahianna Lopez. From a very early age, Lopez […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1710,"featured_media":15015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15189,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186\/revisions\/15189"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/nursing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}