Presidential Doctoral Fellowship for Research Training in Health Disparities

• Tuition and mandatory fees waived for four years during doctoral studies
• A stipend
• Travel funding to present on health disparities research at professional meetings or conferences
• Funding for membership dues in professional associations related to health disparities 

• Doctoral degree in any of UAlbany’s PhD or DrPH programs
• Certificate of Graduate Study in Health Disparities
• Trusted doctoral advisor  
• Four rotational mentors from experiential learning placements
• Dedicated writing and statistical support 

• Four experiential learning placements with community groups, research labs, NGOs, and state and local health departments
• CEMHD’s annual President’s Forum on Health Disparities
• CEMHD’s monthly Minority Health Task Force meetings
• Collaboration with CEMHD’s faculty associates

To be eligible for the fellowship, applicants must be:

• Well-prepared for doctoral study
• A member of an underrepresented group
• A United States citizen or permanent resident
• Eligible for employment in the United States

A master’s degree is preferred but not required. 

A student seeking admission to the fellowship program must separately apply for admission to two programs:

• Any PhD or DrPH program
• Certificate of Graduate Study in Health Disparities program

Apply for admission through the Graduate School.

Note: Graduate programs have their own application requirements and deadlines. You may need to apply earlier than the doctoral program’s deadline to be considered for the fellowship. 

Fellowship applicants must also provide a one-page essay describing their interest in health disparities issues and research. This is due by February 1 of the year in which an applicant plans to begin doctoral studies at UAlbany.

Essays should be submitted via email to both [email protected] and the head of the applicant’s intended doctoral program. Please use “Health Disparities Fellowship Application Essay” as an email subject line.

Once you're admitted to a doctoral program, the program must nominate you for the fellowship. That nomination and your fellowship essay will be reviewed by the Fellowship Committee, which makes recommendations to the fellowship program director.

You and your doctoral program will be notified of the program’s final decision.  

If you are invited to participate in the fellowship program, you must accept or decline by the deadline provided. Note: This date may be before your intended doctoral program’s application deadline. 

You must earn a doctoral degree in any of UAlbany’s PhD or DrPH programs. Your assigned graduate advisor will also serve as your primary fellowship mentor.

You must also earn a Certificate of Graduate Study in Health Disparities from UAlbany. Visit the Graduate Bulletin for the certificate program’s requirements. Note: Any course substitution must be approved by CEMHD.

You must remain a registered, full-time graduate student to receive funding for your tuition, mandatory fees and stipend.

To be considered full-time, you must register for 9 credits. Fellows who wish to register for 12 credits must request approval from CEMHD in writing before registration.

Once you’ve completed all required coursework and successfully passed your qualifying exams, you can then register for a 1-credit dissertation course and still be considered full-time. 

You must complete four experiential learning placements, which are a key component of the fellowship’s transdisciplinary training. You will work with a mentor at each placement.

Placements, or rotations, should broaden your experience by helping you learn about fields that intersect with your doctoral specialization but are not within it, so you can better understand how other fields could support your intended research and how your research could support them.

Placements can be:

• A research experience with a researcher from a field outside your area of expertise
• A practical placement with a local NGO, government agency, CEMHD Minority Health Task Force or CEMHD itself
• A regularly scheduled course in health disparities outside of your dissertation area with additional tutorials
• An independent study course mechanism

Review experiential learning placement opportunities.  

You may not repeat placements, and placements cannot be with your graduate advisor, who serves as your primary mentor in the fellowship program.

Typically, some of the placements happen after a fellow’s first year of graduate study and before they begin writing a dissertation. Once you complete four rotations, you will concentrate on your own research, under their primary mentor’s supervision.

The time commitments for each rotation should be equal to that of one course (about six to nine hours per week for one semester), or about 20 to 25% of the fellow’s course load.

You may obtain credit for a placement by registering for an independent study in your academic department, with your primary mentor’s approval, if desired. Otherwise, placements are considered volunteerism.

You will work with a mentor at each placement. This rotational mentor (not your primary mentor) should supervise your placement. You and your rotational mentor will speak with your primary mentor about the placement monthly during the semester of that rotation.

You must obtain approval from both your primary mentor and the CEMHD director for each placement at least two weeks before the start of the placement. We recommend requesting approval the semester before the placement would occur.

To request approval, you must submit an Experiential Learning Placement Approval Form and include the name of the organization or scholar, their goal for the placement and the number of hours expected.

At the end of each placement, you must submit a Experiential Learning Placement Final Report Form to both your primary mentor and the CEMHD director. 

Fellows are required to attend:

• Seven Minority Health Task Force meetings each academic year
• Monthly fellow meetings during the academic year

Meeting information is shared via email. Attendance is taken at all meetings. 

Fellows’ tuition and mandatory fees are waived for four years during their doctoral studies. If you do not complete all degree requirements in four years, you may request consideration of a fifth year of funding. 

Approval for a fifth year of funding is based on academic performance, mentor evaluations and funding availability. Additional funding may be available through your academic departments.

The fellowship does not cover optional fees and fellows are responsible for any applicable optional fees that appear on their student account.

Graduate students may opt-out of some fees. Please visit the Office of Student Accounts’ Fees Descriptions & Policies webpage for more information.

You are allocated $500 per academic year to cover professional association membership dues.  

You must confirm with CEMHD that an organization’s dues are eligible for reimbursement before incurring charges.  

To be reimbursed, you must submit an electronic receipt with the organization’s name, amount paid and purpose of payment (membership). Note: Reimbursement may take a few weeks to be processed.

Any unused portion of the annual allocation cannot be rolled over to the next academic year.

You are allocated $1,500 per academic year to cover domestic travel (airfare, accommodations and meals) to annual professional meetings or conferences within your discipline to present a paper or poster focused on health disparities.

You must submit your abstract to CEMHD to confirm that your travel is eligible for reimbursement. Do not make purchases without this confirmation.

Any unused portion of the annual allocation cannot be rolled over to the next academic year.

To be reimbursed, you must supply the following documentation:

• Conference program’s first page, with printed details of conference
• Conference program page that lists your presentation title and abstract
• Original receipt of your conference registration
• Original receipt for your lodging (must clearly identify the lodging facility)
• Original receipts for your meals (cannot include alcoholic beverages)
• Original receipts for your transportation to and from the conference
  • Transportation to venues unrelated to the conference, such as restaurants, is not reimbursable.
  • If you use a personal vehicle, you must submit the conference address to be reimbursed for mileage.
• Original receipts for your parking, if applicable (must clearly state location is near or at conference venue)

Failure to supply necessary documentation will result in the denial of your reimbursement request. Expenses over the $1,500 annual allocation will not be reimbursed. 

Primary mentors are required to work with their fellow to discuss, complete and approve the forms required for their appointment with the Research Foundation (RF) or UAlbany.  

Please be aware of the following:

• Fellows may not be classified as a regular Research Assistant or Graduate Assistant by their mentor.
• Fellows are not expected to work for their mentor in any capacity.
• Fellows’ ongoing work as a Research Assistant or Graduate Assistant is to aid in their degree progression, as fellows are hired by the RF or UAlbany and not by their academic department.

NIH Fellow Appointment Forms

If the fellow is classified as an NIH Fellow, they should complete the Research Foundation Human Resources (RFHR) appointment process. 

Please click the links below to access the correct RFHR forms and submission instructions:

• RFHR Employee Appointment Form
• RFHR Address / Emergency Contact Form
• RFHR New Employee Tax Forms:
  • Federal W-4 Form
  • New York State IT-2104 Form
• RFHR Direct Deposit of Salary Enrollment Form
• RFHR Employment Applications
• RFHR Employment Eligibility Verification (Federal I-9 Form)
• RFHR Telecommuting Forms (If working remotely)

Hearst Fellow Appointment Forms

If the fellow is classified as a Hearst Fellow, they should complete the UAlbany Human Resources (HR) appointment process. 

Please click the links below to access the correct HR forms and submission instructions:

• HR New Employee Information Form (EMP-2 Form)
• HR Position Authorization Request Form (HRM-4 Form)
• HR New Employee Tax Forms:
  • Federal W-4 Form
  • New York State IT-2104 Form
• HR Employment Eligibility Verification (Federal I-9 Form)
• HR Oath Card
• HR Direct Deposit Form
• HR Employee Work Schedule
• HR Job Description
• HR Student Employee Health Plan (SEHP) Enrollment Form

Supervision

Primary mentors are expected to supervise a fellow who is pursuing doctoral work in the mentor’s department and ensure that the fellow meets the fellowship program academic requirements.

End of Semester Evaluations

Primary mentors must also complete an End of Semester Fellow Evaluation on fellows’ progress before the start of the next semester.

A significant part of the evaluation is determining your fellow’s progress toward completing the Health Disparities certificate program.

If you fail to submit a completed evaluation on time, it may affect your fellows’ program support in subsequent years.

The fellowship program is hybrid, given its two funding sources.

• It is a training program originally awarded as a research grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). The letter of awards specifically states that the funds cannot be used for research because it is a training program.
• In 2020, the Hearst Foundation awarded UAlbany additional funding to expand the fellowship program under the same regulations and requirements as the original NIMHD award.

Therefore, we cannot pay fellows or mentors to perform research and we are prohibited from paying stipends. We can only pay them for work performance.

Work Plan 

To accommodate the diverse and, at times, contradictory rules, each fellow must develop with their primary mentor a work plan for which they will be paid as an RF or UAlbany employee.

The work plan cannot include any coursework or lab work completed for academic credit. Their work should involve some activity in health disparities. This activity does not have to be extensive, especially in the fellow’s early years in the program.

For example, fellows are required to attend at least seven Minority Health Task Force meetings and to meet monthly with the fellowship director during the academic year. These activities could be a large part of the work plan.

Timesheets

Primary mentors must also sign off on the work performed for fellows to be paid. You will receive an email to review and approve your fellow’s timesheet electronically.

This is a requirement for all RF and UAlbany employees.

Primary mentors are expected to help their fellows select four experiential learning placements (ELPS), or rotations. It is your responsibility to help your fellow find beneficial rotations, with the assistance of the program director.  

Please review guidelines for the experiential learning placements, which includes a list of opportunities recommended by the program.

At each placement, fellows work with a rotational mentor, who supervises their work there.  

A primary mentor is expected to evaluate and guide their fellow’s rotation monthly during the semester of the placement by consulting with the rotational mentor and meeting with the fellow once per month.

Both types of fellowship mentors are allocated funding each academic year to cover their own domestic travel (airfare, accommodations and meals) so they may accompany their fellow to professional meetings or conferences to present on health disparities research.  

Note: The presentation(s) must be clearly related to health disparities and within the fellow’s focus of study. This must be clear from the abstract(s).

Primary mentors are allocated $1,500 annually for travel. Rotational mentors are allocated $500 annually for travel. Fellows also receive travel funding for these purposes.

Any unused portion of the annual allocation cannot be rolled over to the next academic year. Likewise, you cannot be reimbursed for travel that took place during a different academic year.

Note: If the fellowship program experiences a shortfall in anticipated revenue, funds typically set aside for mentors may not be available. In these circumstances, all available funds will be used to support current fellows.

You must submit your abstract to CEMHD to confirm that your travel is eligible for reimbursement. Do not make purchases without this confirmation.

To be reimbursed, you must supply the following documentation:

• Conference program’s first page, with printed details of conference
• Conference program page that lists your and/or your fellow’s presentation title and abstract
• Original receipts of your and your fellow’s conference registrations
• Original receipt for your lodging (must clearly identify the lodging facility)
• Original receipts for your meals (cannot include alcoholic beverages)
• Original receipts for your transportation to and from the conference
  • Transportation to venues unrelated to the conference, such as restaurants, is not reimbursable.
  • If you use a personal vehicle, you must submit the conference address to be reimbursed for mileage.
• Original receipts for your parking, if applicable (must clearly state location is near or at conference venue)

Failure to supply necessary documentation will result in the denial of your reimbursement request. Expenses over the annual allocation will not be reimbursed.

Primary mentors are also allocated $500 annually to support professional associations and/or societies’ dues.  

Please contact the CEHMD director for reimbursement instructions. 

Note: If the fellowship program experiences a shortfall in anticipated revenue, funds typically set aside for mentors may not be available. In these circumstances, all available funds will be used to support current fellows.

Guillermo entered the fellowship in 2019 and is in his final year of the doctoral program at UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice.  

Guillermo’s general research interests include:  

• Crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
• Organized criminal groups
• The structural and cultural causes and consequences of violence
• The effects of social structural factors on homicide
• Criminal justice policy (evidence-based practices)
• Urban criminology and sociology
• Drug policy

He is a quantitative researcher, thus far mainly using panel and time series models.

Guillermo aims to enter academia and become a leading criminologist (scholar) in crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.  

Guillermo has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor in Department of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University, beginning in Fall 2024.

Justin entered the fellowship in 2020 and is a fourth-year student in the School of Criminal Justice.

Justin’s current research agenda is rooted in addressing racial disparities and inequities in two domains: the criminal legal system and health outcomes.  

Using mixed methods, his work follows three paths:

• An experiment that utilizes a probability sample to clarify the relationship between language and framing and beliefs about criminal justice reform and abolition
• Improving local policy decision-making by examining the county-level association between homicide and life expectancy
• How black men perceive racial discrimination as they navigate healthcare treatment and organizations

Additionally, Justin teaches summer courses on inequality in the criminal legal system and qualitative methods for the Bard Prison Initiative.  

With these various threads of inquiry and his diverse skill set, Justin is excited to continue his work in either an academic or private industry setting after graduation. 

Jazmin entered the fellowship program in 2020 and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her sub-specialty is cultural medical anthropology.

Jazmin’s main research interests are reproductive health and healthcare disparities, as well as the circulation of health-related conspiracy beliefs.  

Currently, she is conducting research for her dissertation, which looks at contraceptive access, attitudes and decision making among rural southern African American women in North Carolina.  

Aside from her dissertation research, she recently worked on an interdisciplinary research study looking at vaccine behaviors and attitudes among reproductive age African American women in New York.  

She is currently working on the manuscripts from this project with her faculty collaborators. With her work, her overall goal is to help achieve health and healthcare justice. 

Rosie entered the fellowship program in 2020 and is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of Social Welfare. She is interested in how health policy enables and mitigates inequalities.  

Her academic goals are to explore strategies to bring together health equity, and micro-level and macro-level social work practices and principles within the health policy-setting environment.  

As part of the fellowship, Rosie collaborates with CEMHD’s Albany community health task force to effectuate goals.  

Rosie specializes in the implementation of translational and interventional research in public health; advancing health equity; and the social and behavioral aspects of public health pedagogy and instruction.

She has also worked with both executive leadership and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians to develop health equity related medical education tools for over 12,000 internal medicine physicians and medical students with a specific focus on improving diversity along the medical professionalization pipeline. 

Ruth entered the fellowship program in 2021 and is a third-year student in the doctoral program within the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies department.  

Ruth’s research interests involve Latinx, migration, health, and labor studies as well as qualitative methods that amplify community-based concerns and creativity.

Through the collection of oral histories, her dissertation explores the experiences of Central American undocumented domestic workers from the 1970s to the present.

Ruth centers the voices of women participating in this labor market to provide significant insights into remaining questions regarding Latin American immigrants’ community formation, informal household labor, and migrant health inequities in the US.  

For over a year, she collaborated with CEMHD’s Amsterdam Health Task Force to raise awareness about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation among Spanish-speaking local migrant farm workers and translated a pamphlet from English to Spanish to raise awareness across the increasing language barrier in healthcare.  

She also worked with Capital District Latinos on a community theater project to increase health promotion through community engagement.

In 2023, she worked with the Division of Community Outreach and Medical Education of Albany Medical Center to develop a qualitative service-learning assessment focused on the impacts of student service-learning experiences. 

Radhika entered the fellowship program in 2021 and is a third-year sociology doctoral student.

Her current research examines how acculturation contributes to health outcomes among racially minoritized groups. She is also interested in substance use and mental health issues.  

Radhika recently published a paper in the journal Health Behavior Research which examined adolescent marijuana use behaviors across the life course and within different demographic groups.  

She has worked with the New York chapter of the American College of Physicians’ (NYACP) pain management task force, on drug policy and treatment, which is especially important given the rising trends in opioid overdose and deaths since the pandemic.

With this task force, Radhika worked on updating the opioid training course required for all New York doctors to include data on racial disparities in drug overdose specific to New York State.  

Additionally, Radhika provided recommendations to NYACP’s Health and Public Policy Committee on legislation concerning opioid overdose prevention in NYS K-12 schools.  

She drafted a legislative memo on behalf of NYACP, which included practical suggestions about how schools and families can work together in opioid overdose prevention and intervention.  

Radhika’s goal is to translate her research into actionable steps by informing proposed policy and educational training among the health-care workforce. 

Esperanza joined the PhD program in the Biological Sciences Department and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.

She has been active in organizations focused on supporting BIPOC students in STEM and established a chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.  

Esperanza’s awareness of these disparities, academically and personally, has fueled her pursuit of a PhD in hopes of contributing meaningful findings that may lead to more effective treatments.  

Her research interests include investigating the development and applications of stem cells and how molecular signaling changes can lead to systemic diseases. Currently, Esperanza’s research focuses on the process of protein synthesis process known as translation.  

Earlier this year, she developed a new assay using a luciferase-encoding RNA. Last fall, Esperanza, with her advisor and collaborators, continued expanding this project by incorporating modifications in their luciferase-encoding RNA.  

In the upcoming year, the team is preparing a manuscript with their findings for publication. They have also begun a secondary project assembling a fluorescent coding construct to determine the efficiency of sequences that may drive non-canonical translational.  

One of her goals is to strengthen the communication between biomedical researchers and BIPOC communities. 

Kennedi entered the PhD program in the Biological Sciences Department and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.  

Her research focuses on understanding senescence as a related factor contributing to salivary gland dysfunction and develop/engineer exosomes with miRNAs to limit the severity of disease.  

Kennedi’s goals are to define contributing factors to salivary gland dysfunction and understand health disparities aspect of head and neck cancer patients.  

She is currently working on in vitro and mouse models to produce preliminary data of aging and senescence to receive more funding and for future presentations.  

She gave a presentation at the RNA Institute Bioinformatics program about understanding the biological genes in African American women’s ancestry versus Caucasian women’s ancestry among cases of aggressive breast cancer and understanding the differences between the two groups of women. 

Renae entered the PhD program in Biological Sciences at the School of Public Health and the fellowship program in Fall 2021.  

Renae is a rising black dentist-scientist who is passionate about increasing health opportunities for all.  

Her work entails elucidating mechanisms that drive Sjogren's Disease — the second most prevalent autoimmune disease in the United States, which affects women more than men and American Indians more than African Americans and European Americans.  

In this past year, Renae has focused on providing a forum for fellow graduate students in the School of Public Health who identified as BILPOC to be mentored by their peers.  

They discussed topics like navigating their graduate career as a BILPOC and the importance of investing in your village for career development. Renae benefited as she sought to benefit others.

Jacob entered the fellowship program in Fall 2023, as a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology.  

Over the last year, Jacob has been deeply engaged in researching health disparities in predominantly minority neighborhoods, with a specific focus on the Bronx, NY.

He is committed to understanding and addressing the complex social and economic factors that contribute to unequal health outcomes in these communities.  

Together with Dr. Ruchs-Ahidiana, Jacob is currently assisting with a publication that aims to measure and analyze racialized labor markets.  

Their goal is to investigate the existence of occupational segregation and understand the dynamics of job selection across different racial and ethnic groups.

This research is particularly important in highlighting how systemic inequalities in employment contribute to broader health disparities.  

In addition to his academic research, he has expanded his focus this year to include community-oriented projects.

He aims to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world application, ensuring that his work contributes to tangible improvements in the lives of people in these communities.  

He is excited to continue exploring new and constructive ways to make a positive impact on the lives of those affected by health disparities. 

Chrismery entered the fellowship program in 2023 and is a third-year DrPH student in the School of Public Health.

She has held positions conducting domestic violence and sexual assault prevention, youth substance use prevention, gambling prevention and addressing health disparities among vulnerable and marginalized populations.  

In addition to her studies at UAlbany, she co-chairs the Massachusetts Public Health Association’s Racial Equity and Health committee and belongs to a historically Black sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho.  

Her research interests include minority health disparities, marginalized communities, and translational research. Her goals are to decrease gaps in life expectancy rates through community engagement and advocacy efforts.  

Currently, Chrismery is collaborating on a project spearheaded by the Albany Medical Center piloting interventions that reduce abuse of opioids through the emergency department.  

Ms. Gonzalez’s goal is to be at decision-making tables and ensure all policies, practices, and resources are carried out in equitable manners that address the neglected communities of color experience.