Faculty Candidate Presentation: Elizabeth Heitkemper, PhD, RN

Topic: Improving Diabetes Health Disparities Through Novel Informatics Solutions

Where: College of Nursing, Room 470

Elizabeth Heitkemper is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. The goal of her research is to develop interventions that reduce the health disparities of medically underserved adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. She is interested in understanding the factors that contribute to health engagement, improving access and approaches to diabetes self-management education and services through traditional and informatics-based solutions, and utilizing implementation and translational science to bring innovations into routine clinical practice.

In past work, she has examined the potential for a culturally tailored website to increase diabetes problem-solving in minority, low-income adults. Dr. Heitkemper is part of a team that created a voice-enabled application (app) to provide personalized nutrition planning, which was selected as one of the finalists for The Alexa Diabetes Challenge competition by Amazon Web Services, Inc. She is also working on a study utilizing a SMART design to examine engagement with multiple nutrition-based diabetes interventions in one mHealth app.

Dr. Heitkemper was recently elected as Co-Member-at-Large in the Nursing Informatics Working group for the American Medical Informatics Association, has continued her clinical practice by working as community health nurse, and shown a commitment to excellence in teaching as a Columbia University Lead Teaching Fellow from 2016-2017. She is pursuing funding opportunities to establish a program of research dedicated to health equity and the building of better futures through health promotion and illness self-management.

Live-stream is available for this event. Link will be active on the day of the presentation. Please click on this URL to join: https://uahs.zoom.us/j/430956151