Meet the team
Dr. Kylie Smith
Dr. Gaea Daniel
Dr. Sarah Febres-Cordero
Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu
Dr. Avi Wofsy
Dr. Marissa Nichols
Octavia Vogel
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Founding Director
Kylie is an Associate Professor, tenured, and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities and Associate Faculty in the Department of History at Emory. Kylie is also the Director of the Emory Center for Healthcare History and Policy.
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Faculty Associate
Dr. Gaea Daniel Ph.D., R.N, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing. Her program of research focuses on sociocultural and environmental influences on sexual health behaviors and outcomes of Black women.
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Faculty Associate
Dr. Sarah Ferbes-Cordero Ph.D., R.N, is a Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing. Her work is portrayed in a graphic medicine novel addressing opioid overdose identification and naloxone administration by laypeople HOOKED: When Want Becomes Need.
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CHHAP Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Marissa Nichols earned her PhD in Latin American history from Emory University in 2023. 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.. In her work for the HIP Lab, Dr. Nichols manages Las Voces Oral History Project.
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CHHAP Pre-Doctoral Scholar
Avi Wofsy, RN MSN PMHNP-BC is a fourth year PhD student in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Her work focuses on community mental health policy and policing in Atlanta.
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CHHAP Visiting Scholar
Broadly, Udodiri’s research explores the intersection of race, gender, and medicine and cultural understandings of health and disease. Her dissertation, "Transgressive Motherhood: Maternal Mental Illness, Diagnostic Privilege, and Race in American Psychiatry, 1890 - 1970," investigates how racial science and racialized constructions 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 late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Udodiri's work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the American Association for University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology. Outside of her graduate studies, Udodiri also worked as a Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Science Education (RDEISE) Research Fellow at 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 of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and low-income students.
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CHHAP Pre-Doctoral Scholar
Octavia Vogel, RN, MPH is a fourth year PhD student in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Her research focuses on experiences of anti-blackness (racism, prejudice, and discrimination) at the level of the clinical encounter and how it operates differently based on nativity, ethnicity, and body size among Black women.