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overview
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Dr. Stewart has over 25 years of experience engaging communities, both domestically and internationally, in research, evaluation, and in interdisciplinary efforts to improve public health, particularly among rural populations with health disparities. She has developed a strong knowledge base and broad skillset for engaging communities and holds multiple leadership roles that attest to her expertise in this area. She began her career in Bangladesh, where she served on teams evaluating the population health impact of community programs as well as the critical role of socio-cultural determinants of health. She also has a solid understanding of the challenges of population-based research gained through a three year fellowship and five years of in-depth field experience overseeing national demographic and health surveys in under-resourced settings such as Namibia, Ethiopia, and the Philippines; designing survey instruments; and conducting cross-country survey data analysis. Since returning home to Arkansas in 1997, she has led programmatic and research initiatives requiring strong cross-sector partnerships at the regional, state, and community levels, with an emphasis on increasing healthcare access in rural communities and reducing health disparities related to race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She has partnered with communities to create data and human resource infrastructure for community engaged research and program evaluation with support from NIH, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Agriculture, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as state-level public and philanthropic sources. She has directed the Office of Community-Based Public Health in the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health (COPH) since 2001 and oversees community engagement for the Arkansas Center for Health Disparities, the Arkansas Prevention Research Center, and the UAMS Translational Research Institute. As a professor in health policy and management, she has integrated her expertise in community-based participatory research and health disparities to leverage policy changes related to access to care, community health workers, and long-term care. She also studies the science of community engagement. She has extensive experience teaching and mentoring graduate students and junior faculty in community engagement.
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