Announcements

Vishal A. Shetty successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, “Impact of patient sociodemographic characteristics on primary care clinician empathic communication over patient portal messages,” on April 15, 2026. He will commence a postdoctoral fellowship at Geisinger starting July 2026 in which he will continue to use large language models to improve patient-provider communication, quality of care, and healthcare administration.

Dr. Martínez recently completed a three-month intensive professional DJ course at Plastic Academy in Barcelona, Spain. She will incorporate her DJ’ing in her undergraduate teaching to improve accessibility for sonic learners and engage youth in participatory research projects that examine discrimination in relation to health.

Last summer, Samantha Kloft completed the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Vienna Summer 2025. During the YSSP, she worked with interdisciplinary scholars to examine the role of trust and the public’s adherence to public health recommendations and guidelines. So far, she has found that persons with lower educational attainment and income, as well as persons living in rural areas are more likely to mistrust public health authorities.

Samantha Kloft, PhDc was recently awarded the Graduate School’s Field Dissertation Grant to conduct a community-engaged, grounded theory project that seeks to produce a conceptual framework of community-centered strategies that can be implemented to strengthen trust in public health authorities. She will conduct in-depth interviews with public health stakeholders and residents from two areas: Western Massachusetts and Eastern Iowa. She will discern the reasons for mistrust in local, state, and federal public health authorities and identify areas of convergence and divergence between public health leaders and lay people. These funds will allow her to complete her dissertation research.

Parastoo Dezyani has successfully defended her dissertation prospectus, “Psychological Distress and Problem Gambling Over Time: Within-Person Temporal Dynamics, Modifiable Mechanisms, and the Clinical Course of Remission and Relapse” on April 24, 2026.