Tuesday, November 30 - 12 PM ET
Designing and Evaluating Digital Interventions to Promote Healthy Lifestyles among Hispanic Families
Assistant Professor
Hispanics in the U.S. are just as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to own a smartphone and more likely to be smartphone-only internet users. A surprisingly underutilized approach for promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors among Hispanic families is through digital (i.e., eHealth/mHealth) interventions. Dr. St. George will discuss her work developing two family-based digital lifestyle interventions for Hispanic families in South Florida: (1) NIH K01-funded project, “Healthy Juntos” (Healthy Together); and (2) V Foundation for Cancer Research-funded project, “Con Cariño, Abuelita” (With Love, Grandma). She will describe the process of co-designing these interventions with Hispanic grandparents, parents, and youth, as well as some of the lessons she has learned as a junior investigator entering the tech health field.
Dr. St. George received her PhD in clinical-community psychology from the University of South Carolina and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She is currently Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where she directs the Health eLifestyles Lab and MS in Prevention Science and Community Health degree program. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating family-based digital lifestyle interventions for Hispanics which integrate multiple generations (e.g., grandparents, parents, children) to prevent obesity, cancer, and other chronic diseases.