Meet the Team

Minjin Kim is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. She is dedicated to reducing health disparities, improving health promotion and disease prevention and advancing innovation using human-centered interventions to improve health and reach underserved, high-need populations. Promoting health equity and understanding the root causes of health disparities has emerged for Kim as a powerful and rewarding pathway. In particular, she has acquired specific expertise with the intervention modality of "storytelling" leveraging technologies including digital health, mHealth and chatbots, to enhance health communication with racial, ethnic and minority populations. 

Kim is co-editor and author of the book The 1.5 Generation Korean Diaspora: A Comparative Understanding of Identity, Culture, and Transnationalism. She is a KL2 scholar through the Center for Clinical & Translational Science & Training at UC and has recently been selected for the Association for Leadership Science in Nursing Foundation Pilot Award.

Natasha Rodriguez is a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati's master's in public health program. She earned a bachelor's in liberal arts: medicine, health and society and completed certificates in minority health, medical humanities and pre-medicine at UC. She founded PASO, UC's Filipino cultural organization, and has worked with university and local organizations to cultivate Asian American culture in the Cincinnati area. She is interested in health equity and has worked with Cincinnati Children's, the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition and Crossroads Health Center and others to conduct research and gain experience workthin with and for underserved populations. Near the end of her graduate program, she began working with Dr. Kim on her Racism Storytelling Project and has joined the team to continue this work. Natasha hopes to advance minority health disparities through education and research.

Ellie Kim is an undergraduate student at Penn State University studying biochemistry/molecular biology and piano. Since the beginning of her college career, she has delved into research to get a better understanding of human health. Currently, her interests lie in understanding infectious disease through basic science research, as well as advocating for vaccinations for her local community through the student organization Vaccinate America. Kim is also a part of the professional organization Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA) where she has had the opportunity to get to know and work with fellow Korean-American students and mentors. With her interest in vaccine advocacy and her Korean-American community, she opted to join Minjin Kim's project to address health disparities within the Korean-American community.

Ayşe Guler has been a registered midwife for 10 years and a registered nurse for seven years in Turkey. Her clinical experience as a midwife involves working at various departments of women’s health for six years. She has worked as a women’s health educator, clinical nurse mentor and nurse researcher. Her research program focuses on the development, implementation and evaluation of culturally appropriate interventions for women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV). Her dissertation research is focused on examining risk and protective factors associated with women’s exposure to IPV and the help-seeking process in women from different demographic and cultural backgrounds. As a nurse scientist, she is passionate about promoting health equity for women by identifying unique factors associated with IPV exposure in women from underprivileged minority groups. Her focus of research is to develop interdisciplinary, culturally appropriate IPV prevention programs to address barriers and facilitators in the help-seeking for IPV from formal resources among women from underprivileged minority groups. During her doctoral studies, she worked as a research assistant on several interdisciplinary research projects, including Minjin Kim's project on HPV studies. In addition, she served as the first president of an international student organization at the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing.

Francisco Javier de la Garza Iga is a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati's master's in public health program. His capstone project focused on comparing two different point-of-water filtration systems' practicality and microbiological efficiency to address water needs in rural Guatemala. He graduated from Xavier University with a B.A. in philosophy, politics and the public (an interdisciplinary honors program) and a B.S. in Biology with a minor in chemistry. He is an international research assistant from Monterrey, Mexico. Since he moved to the United States for college, he has come to the realization that many minority groups are heavily discriminated against and lack opportunities for work and education due to their ethnicity and/or migration status. With this in mind, he opted to join Kim's project to address disparities faced by the Latino community.