2022-2023 FACULTY FELLOWS
Forgive Avorgbedor, Ph.D., RN
Dr. Avorgbedor is an assistant professor at UNCG School of Nursing. Her research focuses on complications with diabetes and hypertension while pregnant. Specifically, she studies the biological, social, and psychological conditions that affect health during pregnancy and postpartum.
Dr. Avorgbedor also explores structural racism and discrimination, inflammation-related genes, and maternal and infant health outcomes.
Her plans to use her time as a CWHW fellow to conduct interdisciplinary team research to better understand the cumulative effects of neighborhood factors on the cardiovascular health of young adult women. The ultimate goal is to create prevention and intervention measures to help reduce the negative risk factors linked with cardiovascular disease.
Kierra Sattler, Ph.D.
Dr. Kierra Sattler focuses on risk and resilience among families who live in poverty or are involved in child protective services. Her primary goal for the CWHW Fellowship program is to gain expertise in physical health resilience among mothers and children who live in poverty and to understand the risk and protective processes that promote physical health resilience.
Specifically, Dr. Sattler will focus on pregnancy and the first three years of life as a sensitive period for resilience among mothers and their young children.
2021-2022 Faculty Fellow
Jessica Dollar, Ph.D.
Dr. Jessica Dollar is a Research Scientist in the Department of Kinesiology, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Faculty Fellow for the Center for Women’s Health and Wellness. Dr. Dollar began her research career as an Undergraduate Research Fellow at UNC-Greensboro in the Department of Psychology. After graduating from UNC-Greensboro, Dr. Dollar served as the Project Coordinator for a large, collaborative NSF-funded project at The Center for Developmental Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. She then attended graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University, earning her M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies. Dr. Dollar also has been intricately involved in every level of the research process and has received extensive training in advanced statistical analysis.
Taking a biopsychosocial approach to development, Dr. Dollar’s research examines the role of early emotional and self-regulatory development, within the social context, on psychological and physical health outcomes from childhood through adolescence. Specifically, her research focuses on how the emotional components of reward sensitivity and self-regulation across various levels of functioning (i.e., physiological, emotional, behavioral, cognitive) impact mental health, engagement in risky health behaviors (i.e., substance use), and cardiometabolic risk for girls across early development. In addition, Dr. Dollar’s work considers how caregivers and peers serve as important contexts that influence and are influenced by these developmental trajectories.
Dr. Dollar has served as a PI and co-I on a number of NIH-funded interdisciplinary grants, including The RIGHT Track Project at UNC-Greensboro. Dr. Dollar also has been intricately involved in writing a number of interdisciplinary grant proposals and looks forward to continuing this work for the CWHW.