NCID-1678
Sasha Fleary
Associate Professor in Community Health and Social Sciences
CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy
Education/Degree:
1 Clinical Psychology (Texas A&M)
About
Dr. Fleary is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Social Sciences at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She is the treasurer of the International Health Literacy Association and co-founder and chair of the Child and Family Health Literacy Interest Group of the International Health Literacy Association. Dr. Fleary’s program of research focuses on building social and cultural health capital in children, adolescents, and families who are minoritized and their communities through individual and community-level interventions. She leverages health literacy as an empowerment tool for personal and community advocacy. Among her currently funded research are an NIH-NIDDK funded digital health literacy and obesity prevention intervention for adolescents and an USDHHS-funded (in collaboration with NYCDOHMH) community organization-level health literacy intervention. Acknowledging that these types of interventions work best if systemic inequities are addressed, Dr. Fleary’s most recent work has zoomed in on the role of the library as a transformative system critical for improving public health. Dr. Fleary’s work has been published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, American Journal of Health Behavior, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, Health Literacy Research and Practice, and Appetite.
Current Work
Dr. Fleary’s primary goals are (1) to develop interventions and programs sensitive to social determinants of health to empower children, adolescents, and families who are underserved to engage in preventive health behaviors and advocate for themselves and their communities and (2) to contribute to building research evidence to affect policy and systemic change. Ultimately, Dr. Fleary hopes to reduce child and adult chronic disease risk and health disparities among minoritized communities. Dr. Fleary's current research projects explores factors affecting individual-level, community-level, and organizational-level health literacy. She conducts large scale cross-sectional and longitudinal survey projects to build evidence to affect policies and programming as well as to inform her intervention work. Among Dr. Fleary’s current and future projects are a population survey of adults in New York City’s mental health and wellbeing, a longitudinal dyad study of parents’ and adolescents’ health literacy and health behaviors, and a randomized controlled trial of a digital intervention to improve adolescents’ health literacy and obesity-related behaviors.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Children and families, community-engaged research, Health Disparities, health literacy, preventive health, mental health, health equity, Social Justice