Earlise Ward, PhD, MS

As a researcher and licensed psychologist, Ms. Ward has witnessed first-hand the impact of mental health disparities among African Americans. In her clinical work, she has seen many of her African American patients struggle with lack of access to mental health services, low availability of services in their community, and poor quality and culturally inappropriate care. Thus, she has dedicated her career to reducing and eliminating mental health disparities. Her program of research focuses on developing and testing culturally appropriate mental health interventions for African American adults. I began her research career with a series of descriptive studies that have set the stage for designing and testing a culturally appropriate cognitive behavioral intervention to treat depression for this very vulnerable group. She has designed a series of studies, from pilot/feasibility work to efficacy studies that are providing crucial information about the need for culturally appropriate interventions.

Her research team and I developed and experimentally verified one of the first effective culturally adapted depression intervention for African American adults with depression (R01MD005905). Building on our prior work and growing literature indicating that African Americans are more likely to use religious coping when experiencing mental illness, yet there are no empirically faith-based interventions for this group. This is obviously a major gap in research. We partnered with local faith-based leaders to inform and guide development of a faith-based depression intervention designed for African American adults.  I am currently seeking to examine efficacy of the culturally adapted and theoretically grounded Cognitive Behavioral Faith-Based Intervention (CB-FAITH). This work represents the first to experimentally examine the efficacy of a faith-based intervention to treat depression among African American adults. A U01 NIH grant is currently in review.

As Co-Investigator on the Administrative Core and Other Significant Contributor for the Career Ehnhancement Propgram, I am excited for the opportunity to partner with Dr. Harari and the Head and Neck SPORE team of researchers to advance this important program of research. She has expertise in health disparities research and community-based participatory research with racially diverse groups and communities will be useful accrual goals.