Cheryl Giscombé, PhD, RN, has accepted an offer to join the faculty as a member of the SON’s Health Care Environments division. Giscombé will be recommended for a faculty appointment as assistant professor, and her nine-month academic year faculty appointment will begin July 1, 2009.
Giscombé began her career with a bachelor’s in psychology at NC Central University and subsequently earned her BSN and master’s degree in psychology from SUNY Stony Brook in New York. In 2005, she completed a PhD in Social/Health Psychology at SUNY Stony Brook and began a post-doctoral fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing, working with faculty members Debra Barksdale and Linda Beeber. She extended her post-doctoral period in order to complete the master’s degree in the SON’s psych-mental health nurse practitioner option.
Giscombé’s research focuses on stress-related health disparities and biopsychosocial, cultural and historical determinants of mental health outcomes in African-American women. She conducted her dissertation research on African-American women’s well-being with a grant from the American Psychological Association. During her post-doctoral fellowship, she served as a research associate in the Carolina Lupus Study and conducted research on “superwomen schema” with a grant from the SON’s Center for Innovation in Health Disparities Research. She successfully competed for an R21 NIH grant, “A mindfulness-based intervention to reduce diabetes risk in pre-diabetic African-Americans,” that will begin soon with funding from the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.
Giscombé has five years of teaching assistant and instructor experience in psychology and has also served as an instructor in health assessment and psychiatric/mental health nursing undergraduate courses
at UNC. In her first year on the faculty, she will be principal investigator on her research grant and will establish a psych/mental health nurse practitioner practice. Her teaching contributions will be primarily in the area of psych/mental health nursing.
