New (school) year, new team!

Happy November, MyHealthEd Supporters!

A new school year means a new team of research assistants! We are excited to announce that three awesome UNC graduate students have joined our team. These newest additions include Kendra Madding, Justin Chu, and Joy Martin. Vichi was visiting North Carolina for her work with TEALS at the end of October, so we were able to arrange a meet and greet at Milltown in Carrboro, NC.

 

Pictured above from left to right: Joy, Justin, Vichi, Kendra, Liz, and Beth (our faculty advisor). Thanks to our supporters at #Experiment for sending these swanky t-shirts!

Kendra Madding is a second year Master of Public Health (MPH) student in the Department of Health Behavior at UNC Chapel Hill. She is primarily interested in health education curriculum development and evaluation in underserved public schools and communities. Kendra is working on conducting focus groups for MyHealthEd in order to better understand where students are currently obtaining their sexual health information. 

Justin Chu previously taught health and nutrition education to young children of low-income communities in San Francisco. Currently, he is a first year MPH student in the Department of Health Behavior and is interested in tailored health messaging. Justin updates the MyHealthEd curriculum content and is helping to create a teacher companion website.  

Joy Martin is a first year MPH student at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her concentration is also Health Behavior. Joy is working on translating the MyHealthEd content into animated videos and generating additional content that aligns with Reducing the Risk's adaptation guide for Moodle.

We are preparing for our first pilot study of MyHealthEd’s online sex education program in the coming weeks. We postponed our spring pilot study to accommodate schools’ standardized testing calendars and then the summer break. As mentioned previously, our program is adapted from Reducing the Risk, an evidence-based intervention put forth by ETR. The primary purpose of our pilot study is to assess the feasibility of implementing a program like this in high schools in rural Eastern North Carolina (ENC). In addition, we hope to gather a lot of rich feedback from students and health teachers in ENC about the online platform, the implementation logistics, and the content delivery in order to inform our program development.

We hope that all of you are doing well and look forward to updating you on our progress as we move along!

Liz & Vichi