Center for Healthcare History and Policy

Dr. Gaea Daniel Ph.D., R.N, is a Faculty Associate with the Center, and Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing. Her program of research focuses on sociocultural and environmental influences on sexual health behaviors and outcomes. She is particularly interested in sexual health outcomes of Black women that present as race-based disparities, from intravaginal practices to sexually transmitted infections. Dr. Daniel is a Gilead Sciences Research Scholar, an Emory BIRCWH Scholar, and co-editor of Taking Action: Top 10 Priorities to Promote Health Equity and Well-Being in Nursing

Sara Febres-Cordero, RN, PhD is a doctorally prepared registered nurse trained in community health work and public health nursing. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing, and a faculty associate of the Center. Her work in harm reduction focuses on implementation science and is portrayed in a graphic medicine novel addressing opioid-involved overdose identification and naloxone administration by laypeople HOOKED: When Want Becomes Need.

Octavia Vogel, RN, MPH is a third year PhD student in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Graduate Assistant with the Center. Her research focuses on experiences of anti-Blackness (racism, prejudice, and discrimination) at the level of the healthcare encounter and how it operates differently based on nativity, ethnicity, and body size among Black women.

Dr. Marissa Nichols is theCenter’s inaugural postdoctoral fellow. She earned her PhD in Latin American history from Emory University in 2023. Her research puts nursing history into dialogue with ethnohistory (Indigenous history). Based on her dissertation, her first book project traces how rural nurses and Indigenous communities shaped the expansion of rural healthcare in mid-twentieth-century Oaxaca, Mexico. Her research has been generously supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education) and H-31 Pre-Doctoral Grant (American Association for the History of Nursing), among other sources. As part of the Center, Dr. Nichols is working on continuing her research, teaches classes on the history of race and health care, and supports the Las Voces Oral History Project.

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Udodiri R. Okwandu isa Doctoral Candidate in the History of Science Department and PresidentialScholar at Harvard University.  Broadly, herresearch explores the intersection of race, gender, and medicine and culturalunderstandings of health and disease. Her dissertation, "TransgressiveMotherhood: Maternal Mental Illness, Diagnostic Privilege, and Race in AmericanPsychiatry, 1890 - 1970," investigates how racial science and racializedconstructions of motherhood have informed the evolving classification,diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses (i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy,childbirth, and the postpartum period) in the United States from the latenineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Udodiri'swork has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the American Association for University Women, theInstitute for Citizens and Scholars, the Charles Warren Center for Studiesin American History, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology.Outside of her graduate studies, Udodiri also worked as a RacialDiversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Science Education (RDEISE) Research Fellowat LabXchange from 2021 to 2023. In this role,she designed curriculum on the historical formation of race, scientific racism,and evidence-based strategies that educators can use to promote the success ofBlack, Hispanic, Indigenous, and low-income students.