Laurel Sharpless is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
We reached out to Sharpless to learn more about her work, her life, and her academic journey through the following Q & A.
How did you get into injury and violence prevention work?
Personal experience with adolescent dating violence made me passionate about women’s health and social justice in the context of medicine and inspired me to gain exposure to medicine in a clinical setting. I gained acceptance into a post-baccalaureate research and clinical medicine fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine where I served as a medical scribe for two physicians in internal medicine. Here, I witnessed a notable disparity between intimate partner violence survivors and the healthcare they sought due to the sequelae of violence exposure. I sought out the opportunity to be part of the solution by leading a quality improvement project that resulted in the identification of a more effective strategy for screening patients for intimate partner violence, which engages medical assistants as an initial step of the healthcare response to intimate partner violence. I presented my results to the medical directors of Stanford Primary Care, which prompted an initiative leading to improvements and standardization of intimate partner violence screening throughout the university’s network of primary care and gynecology clinics. This experience exposed me to the impact system-level interventions can have on the health and wellbeing of intimate partner violence survivors and ignited my passion for public health research to address gender-based violence and its health effects.
What projects are you currently working on, and what makes them exciting to you?
Being an IPRC fellow provided me the opportunity to be a summer research intern in the Research and Evaluation Branch in the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this past summer. Here, I assisted with a systematic review of policy evaluations for the prevention of intimate partner violence. Specifically, I helped adapt a quality assessment tool for policy evaluation and used the adapted tool to conduct a bias assessment of papers included in our systematic review. This position also provided me the opportunity to disseminate our preliminary findings to CDC colleagues in Atlanta, Georgia. This experience was exciting because it provided invaluable exposure to working at the CDC. Additionally, our project findings can be used to inform policy evaluation recommendations for the prevention of intimate partner violence and advance the field.
For my doctoral dissertation, I am conducting a pooled cross-sectional study that uses intersectionality to examine the role of state-level restorative justice policies on depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempt among adolescent dating violence girl survivors, and how these impacts may vary by race and ethnicity. This work is meaningful to me because my research findings can inform efforts for an innovative, policy-based solution that can be easily scaled to reduce negative mental health sequelae of adolescent dating violence and inform the enhancement of state RJ policy justice practices to promote mental health equity among adolescent dating violence girl survivors.
What were you doing before you started your program at UNC?
I was at the Yale School of Public Health pursuing my Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Chronic Disease Epidemiology. Here, I gained interdisciplinary training at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School in restorative and transformative justice. This training helped me conceptualize restorative and transformative justice as upstream approaches to address the mental health impacts of gender-based violence. Here, I led an analysis and manuscript that found that perceived adverse mental health among women intimate partner violence survivors is attenuated in states with a restorative justice policy than states without a policy, particularly in states with strong policy implementation support. However, exploratory analyses showed that this impact may not be equitable across intersectional groups of survivors. Building off these findings, I led a qualitative analysis and manuscript aimed at understanding Black women intimate partner violence survivors’ preferences for justice, which was recently published in BMC – Public Health. In this study, we identified transformative justice as a community-based, holistic justice approach that can promote equity by centering Black women intimate partner violence survivors and their communities in the justice response to intimate partner violence.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work and school?
I danced at my mom’s dance studio in Houston, Texas for over 20 years, so dancing is one of my passions that I really enjoy! Additionally, I enjoy spending time at the beach, reading, shopping, traveling, and trying out new restaurants with friends!
What makes you unique?
I am a former National Football League (NFL) cheerleader for the Houston Texans and San Francisco 49ers! Dancing and representing the community for 70,000 fans was an indescribable experience, and I am so grateful I had this unique opportunity.
UNC IPRC’s Injury and Violence Prevention Fellowship program provides an opportunity for UNC-Chapel Hill graduate and professional students from diverse academic, professional, and demographic backgrounds to gain hands-on experience in injury and violence prevention by working with faculty mentors, networking, and pursuing professional development opportunities.