Towards Equitable Design: What We Know and Need to Address about Mental Health Prevention and Promotion among #blackboysandmen

Seminar Title: Towards Equitable Design: What We Know and Need to Address about Mental Health Prevention and Promotion among #blackboysandmen

Seminar Speaker: Dr. Kofoworola Williams, Assistant Professor of Community Health and Prevention at Drexel University.

Seminar Date and Location: Wednesday, February 21st, 2024, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 or online

Seminar Description

Suicide-related behavior and completion rates among young Black men are rising at an alarming rate, making their mental health prevention a critical area of public health focus. In this discussion, Dr. Williams will talk about the current state of mental health literature from a digital equity and intervention lens, pulling in some of her early and recent work and rounding it out with a “where do we go next.” It is imperative that we further work that is appropriate and human-centered in addressing the systemic and structural barriers not only impacting mental health risk among young, Black men but also their engagement with prevention efforts.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Kofoworola D.A. Williams is a social and behavioral scientist and mental health disparities investigator with an extensive background in public health and health behavior change theory. She now serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health and Prevention at Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.

Dr. Williams’ research program is two-fold, employing a human-centered framework and mixed-methods to a) understand how social, behavioral, and structural determinants impact individual mental health and help-seeking behavior and b) investigate the role social media and digital technologies play in improving mental health symptoms and mental health care access among those who are traditionally excluded. These areas of work converge to lay the foundation for future intervention work and inform best practices and approaches for developing digital mental health interventions that are culturally appropriate, accessible, useful, and sustainable.

Prior to Drexel, Dr. Williams was a NRSA T32 postdoctoral research fellow in digital mental health at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs) at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a 2022 recipient of a Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Award from NIMH and a 2021 scholar of NIMHDs’ Health Disparities Research Institute. She earned her PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine where she was also a Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) Doctoral Scholar. She has a BS in Biology and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Global Health from Syracuse University, and an MPH, Environmental and Occupational Health concentration, from Dornsife School of Public Health.