Adolescent development researcher Dr. Sherika Hill has been named a Translating Duke Health Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine.
In addition to her new role, Hill currently serves as a senior research associate at the School of Medicine where she works on studies that look at a certain type of early life stressor and later health outcome in adults. She also is a social clinical research specialist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
To add to all of her positions, Hill also teaches as a co-instructor in the master’s of Biomedical Sciences program at Duke. In her course, Hill collaborates with students on a systematic literature review of the effects on IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) and on the risks for childhood cancers – something that’s “specifically generated” to help recruit underrepresented minorities into the biomedical sciences, she says.
“It’s a way for me to give back and really encourage and mentee younger researchers from underrepresented minority groups,” she says.
Hill’s research focuses on the risk and resilience in adolescent development but more specifically on the role that socioeconomic status and epigenetics play in creating disparities in health and behavioral outcomes.
She first became interested in adolescent development during her Ph.D. training at UNC Chapel Hill, where she conducted obesity research.
“I was looking at longitudinal trends of growth in the first years of life. At that time, infant obesity wasn’t a real term or concept that people gave a lot of creative [attention] to but they were definitely a lot of researcher-established research in adolescent obesity and how to bend the curve,” Hill says. “That’s when I first started thinking about adolescent health in general, trying to understand what the social determinant of obesity is, and a lot of that is around parenting and then the psychology of the mind and the whole development.”
