International Initiatives
Institute for Action Research in Community Health (IARCH) Fellows
IARCH Fellows are university faculty and community-based professionals who represent the fields of nursing, law, medicine, public health, sociology, and dentistry.
To be designated an IARCH Fellow, individuals must:
- have expertise in conducting action research or be committed to promoting the concepts of action research;
- engage in work that builds local capacity to develop, implement, evaluate, and sustain community health promoting initiatives; and
- combine scholarship with service in their primary role as faculty members or community leaders.
Fellows are involved in IARCH-sponsored conferences, seminars, and projects. Please contact the IARCH director, Joanne Martin, DrPH, RN, FAAN (jbmartin [at] iupui [dot] edu), for more information about any of the IARCH fellows.
IARCH Fellows
Anne E. Belcher, DNS, PNP, RN
Belcher has a background in community health nursing with an emphasis on children's health. Her major academic interests are in the areas of action research, community collaboration, school health, immunizations, and populations at risk, such as homeless children. Belcher has been selected to receive Indiana’s Premier Health Award, “The Tony and Mary Hulman Health Achievement Award,” in the field of Preventive Medicine and Public Health.
Dawn Daniels, DNS, RN, CCRN
Daniels is currently the program coordinator for Injury Free Coalition for Kids of Indianapolis at Riley Hospital. She is one of the co-investigators in the development of an injury surveillance system for Marion County, Indiana. She is also working with the community to develop a faith-based permanent fitting station (car seat program) in which community members at local churches are certified as car seat technicians.
Betsy Fife, PhD, RN
Fife is a nurse scientist with a clinical background in coping with the stress of life-threatening illness. She has extensive experience and many publications in this area. Her doctoral degree is in sociology, and she has expertise in the sociology of emotion, coping with stress, and the role of meaning in the process of adaptation.
Kathryn Irene Frank, DNS, RN
Frank’s research has consisted of working with older adults with diabetes to evaluate the impact of an educational experience to improve foot-care behaviors. Another project Frank is involved with is a research project of the Visiting Nurse Services of New York with a study of Medicare recipients in ten cities, including Indianapolis, to evaluate how our city is "Senior Friendly." During the past two years she has participated in a Reynolds grant as the project manager for geriatric education for the state of Indiana.
Janis E. Gerkensmeyer, PhD, RN
Gerkensmeyer’s most recent work is parent satisfaction with mental health services and evaluation of parent support groups. She has published in this area as well as in the area of reliability and validity of scales to measure pain in children.
Joanne Goldbort, PhD, MS, RN
Goldbort is a practicing registered nurse with clinical expertise in the area of maternal and child nursing. Currently, she is the director of maternal and child services at Union Hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana. She has served as chairperson for two statewide Indiana Perinatal Network initiatives to address the issues of perinatal mood disorders, in particular perinatal depression (PPD).
Joan Henkle, DNS, MS, RN
Henkle has recently been involved in several community health issues through her work as a clinical assistant professor with the IU School of Medicine Department of Public Health. For example, one project, in collaboration with IUPUI Health Services and IUPUI Campus Facility Services, is to conduct online Health Risk Assessments of employees. She has also been involved with two initiatives in the community for the past few years. One is the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP) Program and the other is the IUPUI Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) New Directions project.
Ann Johnson, MSN
Johnson is program manager for the MOM Project, a Healthy Families Indiana (HFI) site serving about 300 families on the westside of Indianapolis. Johnson has been the coordinator of communicable disease for Marion County (Indiana) Health Department where she was involved with an Indianapolis Public School Middle School Asthma Project. She also chairs the Evaluation Workgroup for HFI.
Eleanor Kinney, JD, MPH
Kinney is the Hall Render Professor of Law and co-director of the William S. and Christine S. Hall Center for Law and Health at the Indiana University School of Law. Some of her most important projects have included the legal support assessment of county health departments in Indiana and the Project on Indiana’s Medicaid program, funded by Kaiser Family Foundation, and several Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded projects. She has served in several governor-appointed positions, including the Executive Board for the Indiana State Department of Health.
Joyce A. Krothe, DNS, MSN
Krothe directs the IU School of Nursing program on the Bloomington campus and is director of the Brown County Health Support Clinic. She is the recipient of many awards and was a 2002-2003 Community-Campus Partnership for Health Fellow.
Joanne Martin, DrPH, RN, FAAN
Martin's research is in the area of health care financing, policy, infant mortality, breastfeeding, community-based care coordination for pregnant women, home-visiting programs to prevent child abuse and neglect, and program evaluation. Martin is the director of statewide training and technical assistance for Healthy Families Indiana (HFI) and founding director of the MOM Project. She is also the director of Institute for Action Research in Community Health (IARCH) and a ZERO TO THREE Harris Fellow for 2005-2006.
Rose Mays, PhD, RN, FAAN
A specialist in adolescent health care, Mays is a pediatric nurse practitioner and serves as nursing faculty for the Leadership Education in Adolescent Health interdisciplinary program. Her most recent presentations and research have been on the subject of parent-adolescent communication and sexually transmitted disease vaccine acceptance. She has written in Nurse Practitioner on the black family and family stress and adaptation and in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing on autism in young children.
Su Moore, DNS, RN
Moore is the founding director of the award-winning Shalom Health Care Center in Indianapolis. She has received funding for school-based clinics from multiple sources and has published on interdisciplinary team.
Daniel J. Pesut, PhD, RN, FAAN
Well-known for his work in nursing education and psychiatric mental health nursing, Pesut is recognized as a master teacher and has held academic and administrative positions in both the education and public service sector. His research is in the area of volitional psychosomatic self-regulation, clinical reasoning, future studies, and leadership development. He speaks on the topics of creative thinking, clinical nursing, and future studies.
Dixie Ray, PhD
Ray is an associate professor emerita of the IU School of Nursing and one of the founders of the WHO Collaborating Center for Healthy Cities and the Institute for Action Research in Community Health (IARCH). She is an experienced evaluator of community-based programs and has published her work on participatory action research in peer-reviewed journals.
Michael Reece, PhD, MPH
Reece’s current research is focused on two primary areas: HIV-related mental health care service delivery and sexual health promotion. He explores factors associated with the development of mental health care systems that are responsive to the unique needs of individuals living with HIV from ethnic minority and other disenfranchised communities and individuals with additional diagnoses, such as substance addiction. He is also focused on understanding the role of corporate entities that provide sexuality-related services. One project will be centered on ways that women recovering from breast and gynecological-related cancer surgery deal with sexuality issues.
Mary E. Riner, DNS, RN
Riner has a background in community health nursing, international health, and her major academic interests lie in adolescent aggression. She has presented papers at professional meetings and been interviewed as a media expert on adolescent aggression. Her current research focuses on the model she developed called "Social Ecology Model of Adolescent Interpersonal Violence Prevention." Riner is co-director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Healthy Cities. She was accepted as a Boyer Scholar for this year. This is an IUPUI program to strengthen faculty scholarship and research on service learning and civic engagement.
Kathleen Russell, DNS, RN
Russell has focused on improving minority health disparities throughout her entire nursing career. Her program of research is in cancer prevention and control for African American populations. Currently, her studies are on promoting initial and repeat breast cancer screening in medically underserved African American women. In 2005, she was awarded NIH funding to develop and test interventions for lay health advisors to use for increasing mammography screening in their communities.
Robert M. Saywell, Jr., PhD, MPH
Saywell is well regarded for his work as a health economist and his ability to work in partnership with other investigators. He is widely published in peer-reviewed journals, including articles on evaluation of community-based programs.
Carol Shieh, DNSc, MPH, RNC
Shieh has been involved in promoting maternal and women’s health for socially at-risk populations. She developed a research project to collect data in order to develop prenatal education for pregnant women. Carol has also been involved with increasing care providers’ attention on prenatal drug use and contributing to the promotion of women’s health in the Taiwanese nursing community.
Wendy Stoelting-Gettelfinger, JD, DNS, RN
As a doctoral student, Stoelting-Gettelfinger’s dissertation examined the relationships between and among Medicaid population characteristics, use of prenatal care, use of prenatal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) services, and selected birth outcomes in Indiana using 1994 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Data. She was also the primary investigator on a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Infrastructure Grant from 2002 to 2004. In her current position as an assistant professor in the department of environments for health at Indiana University School of Nursing on the Bloomington campus, she is responsible for teaching the didactic portion of the Community Health Nursing course.
Cynthia L. Stone, DrPH, RN
Stone has published on home health care clinical practice issues. She is active with the American Lung Association's Indiana affiliate for tuberculosis education. Stone is initiating a parish nurse clinical practice and will use this for future research and teaching activities. Additionally, she has been appointed by (Indiana) Governor Mitch Daniels to the Home Health Care and Hospice Services Council.
Nancy Swigonski, MD, MPH
Swigonski’s clinical service is in a neighborhood health center, North Arlington Health Center, where she has provided care to teenage mothers and their babies for the past 12 years. She contributed to the Indianapolis Healthy Start evaluation that was a collaborative of the Marion County (Indiana) Health Department and 16 community organizations to increase prenatal care and decrease infant mortality. She is also a co-principal investigator of the Anne E. Dyson Community Pediatrics Training Initiative to equip pediatric residents with relevant tools and knowledge for community practice.
Shelley Vaughn, MS
Vaughn is currently involved in Indianapolis Healthy Start (IHS) program outcomes research in conjunction with program evaluators Dr. Haywood Brown and Mark Smith. She has also been involved with Indiana Access in support of their unintended pregnancy focus groups by having IHS help to recruit consumers to attend and by providing transportation support for participants. She has worked with IHS in developing a Centering Pregnancy Program in conjunction with Wishard Health Services.
Kathy Weaver, JD, MPA, RN
Weaver is the director of the Public Health and Medicine Partnerships at Indiana State Department of Health. She has sought to understand the practice of local public health departments in their ability to provide essential public health services. For almost 30 years she has assisted communities to meet their health care services needs by consulting with local hospitals, not-for-profits, and local health departments to establish maternal and child health clinics, car-seat loan programs, and childhood lead poisoning prevention services. As faculty advisor for the master’s in public health program, Kathy assisted students with the design of their internships and capstone projects.
Corinne Wheeler, PhD(c), MSN, RN
Wheeler conducted an assessment of Warsaw, Poland’s community that led to the planning and implementation of multiple health programs in an ambulatory health clinic. As executive director, she was involved in the Healthy Indy Partnership (HIP), which was a product of a unique 1994 collaboration among Indianapolis’s major hospitals and the Marion County (Indiana) Health Department to fund and conduct Marion County’s first baseline community health assessment. She was also the executive director at The Saint Christopher Center, Inc., which addresses the need for specialized childcare services for families who are homeless.
Eric Wright, PhD
As a graduate student, Wright worked with the Indiana Youth Group, Inc. (IYG), a youth service agency serving gay, lesbian, bisexual, and questioning youth, and the Indiana State Department of Health to develop an innovative HIV prevention program and prepare an application to the Special Projects of National Significance Program at the HIV/AIDS Bureau of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Most recently, he has been working with the Dawn Project, a local system-of-care initiative designed to improve and coordinate the services provided to youth with serious emotional disorders and their families. He is also the director of the Health Policy Center at Indiana University's School of Public & Environmental Affairs (SPEA).
Karen M. Yoder, MSD, PhD
Yoder is the director of the Division of Community Dentistry at IU School of Dentistry and has directed the SEAL INDIANA Program. She is also the course director for the fourth year dental student elective in which the students spend time at Goodwill Industries learning about the agency and its sheltered workshop. Also, for the duration of the existence of the Midwest Consortium for Service-Learning in the Health Professions, Yoder was one of four members of the Indiana team and presented workshops on service learning in approximately 15 Indiana universities and colleges.
Terrell W. Zollinger, DrPH, MSPH
Zollinger is a professor at the IU School of Medicine as well as associate director of the Bowen Research Center. Zollinger serves as a research consultant to hospitals, health departments, managed care organizations, and other health-related organizations. He is the director of evaluation for the Indiana Area Health Education Centers project and the Learning Well, Inc. school-based clinics. He is also a consultant to the Indiana Minority Health Coalition's Racial and Ethnic Minority Epidemiological Center.
Enid E. Zwirn, PhD, MPH, RN
Zwirn has a background in maternal, child, and community health. She is interested in the technologies that make the processes of teaching and learning efficient and effective. Recognized as a dynamic and committed educator, she is a frequent recipient of teaching awards (voted Outstanding Teacher of the Year four times, twice selected as a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award recipient, and selected for Sigma Theta Tau's Education Recognition Award).
