Dr. Joycelyn Thomas
Director
Dr. Thomas’s scholarship and clinical work center on the most marginalized communities. As a Family Nurse Practitioner, she has cared for patients across the lifespan and have over 25 years of clinical experience working in collaboration with specialty healthcare providers throughout my nursing career. Clinically, she has been immersed in Level III high-risk inpatient settings in the Puget Sound Region and have served as an expert and resource in those clinical settings.
She conducts scholarship and research activities with the University of Washington (UW) Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology on racial disparity in preterm birth, NIH clinical trials involving HIV/AIDS-infected pregnant women, and the “Wait One Year Program,” developed in collaboration with a UW Maternal Fetal Medicine Provider and UW Registered Nurses, as well as with the Center for Anti-Racism in the UW School of Nursing.
Kahlea Williams, MS, BSW
Operations Manager
Kahlea brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to MPS CARE. She has worked with MPS CARE in Nursing since its inception in 2021, leading the listening sessions with Dr. Thomas, supporting inaugural Director Monica Mclemore and continuing to grow the Center under Dr. Thomas. With a background in social work and public health, Kahlea has worked in higher education for 7 years.
Advisory Council Members
Dr. Wendy E. Barrington, PhD, MPH
Associate Professor, University of Washington School of Nursing and School of Public Health
The focus of Dr. Barrington’s research is to evaluate to what degree social position, structures, and systems perpetuate cancer health disparities via stress, obesity, and related behaviors. Her research falls within two main schema: promoting healthy communities and racial disparities in clinical outcomes. She is using advanced methods including multilevel modeling and causal mediation analyses to explicate these relationships as well as community-engaged research to promote the health of vulnerable communities. In linking her research with teaching, she is passionate about naming and describing mechanisms of social inequity and discussing with students how these mechanisms manifest in the healthcare system and contribute to health disparities. She is also active within the School of Nursing and the broader UW Health Sciences to facilitate an institutional culture that fosters equity, diversity, and inclusion among students, staff, and faculty.
Rickey Hall
Suha Ballout
Michele Peak Andrasik
Ellen Solis
Patty Hayes
Edwin Lindo
Karie Stewart