Angela U. Ekwonye, Ngozi G. Nwosisi
St. Catherine University, USA University of California, USA
Biography
Dr. Angela Ekwonye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health at St. Catherine University, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, and a member of the congregation of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Mercy. She has over 19 years’ teaching experience at different educational levels. Her research explores the role of spirituality in the mental and physical health of different population groups. Dr. Ekwonye engages adolescents, college students, older adults, and groups of Nigerian Catholic immigrant sisters in her research to understand the role of spirituality in their overall wellbeing. She recently developed a tool for measuring college women’s spirituality. She has published research works in the area of spirituality and mental health. This presentation is a follow up of her previously published work on the effect of a spiritual retreat on perceived stress of Nigerian Catholic immigrant sisters in the USA.
Ngozi Nwosisi is a fifth-year doctoral student of public health (Global health track), at the University of California, Irvine. In 2015, she earned her Master of Public Health degree from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. She has nearly 5 years’ experience as a teaching assistant, leading introductory- and intermediate-level public health courses. Her substantive research areas are broadly at the intersection of chronic disease and behavioral health; psychosocial determinants of health; and technology-aided health delivery and improvement in vulnerable populations. Her dissertation research is on understanding smoking cessation challenges among people living with HIV (PLWH). At various conferences, she has presented her research using quantitative methods on national survey data, evaluating psychosocial determinants of health among immigrants; tobacco use and mental health among PLWH; and suicide risk among youths in the U. S. Ngozi has been a member of the American Public Health Association since 2014.