Meet the Team
The Dreams of our Ancestors are realized as the collective children from around the Diaspora who have come together to utilize their talents, experience and networks to move Liberia Forward.
Dr. Jasmine Abrams
DIRECTOR OF WOMEN'S ADVANCEMENT
Dr. Jasmine Abrams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at Boston University and an Affiliate Faculty member at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at the Yale University School of Public Health with over 10 years of experience conducting prevention research with marginalized groups of women. Dr. Abrams was trained as a Health Psychologist and earned her PhD in the field from Virginia Commonwealth University. As an international behavioral research scientist, her work is conducted with the goal of utilizing culture as an avenue to better understand and reduce health disparities among women of African ancestry, domestically and globally.
Dr. Abrams is fiercely dedicated to sexual health promotion among women of African ancestry and has been involved in a host of culturally relevant research and programmatic efforts related to chronic disease prevention, namely prevention of HIV/AIDS. She has conducted community health research in numerous low-middle-income countries, including South Africa, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
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Dr. Abrams utilizes frameworks and research methods that facilitate collaborative engagement, community empowerment, and capacity building for sustainable change, including community-based participatory research, action research, and multi-level intervention programming. She has also partnered with domestic and international departments and ministries of health for health promotion and equity research and programming. Her demonstrated ability to create and cultivate strong local, national, and international community partnerships has facilitated a firm foundation for her community-based research projects. Dr. Abrams also has expertise in translational community-based and engaged research, prevention science, quantitative and qualitative research, and intervention program development, adaptation, and evaluation.
She has managed large-scale grant funded projects and secured university and federal funding to support health promotion research and programming with women of African ancestry, including funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Fogarty International Center, National Institute for Mental Health, National Institute for Minority Health Disparities, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health.
Dr. Abrams advances and disseminates her work via peer-reviewed publications in psychology, social science, and public health journals such as American Psychologist, Sex Roles, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, BMC Public Health, and Social Science and Medicine. In addition, she disseminates her scholarship at national and international conferences via individual presentations and collaborative symposia (e.g., Society for Behavioral Medicine Annual Meeting, International Congress of Behavioral Medicine, American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, and the American Psychological Association Annual Convention). She has also been invited to speak at local and national community events, radio shows and podcasts, conferences, and scholarly research symposia at esteemed universities, including but not limited to Harvard and Yale Universities.