Academic Research Specialist
Dr. Aspiras is an experimental psychologist with training in social and health psychology. She earned her PhD in experimental psychology at the University of Toledo (2019), where she was a graduate assistant in the Integrating Social Psychology and Health in Research (InSPHIRe) lab. Upon graduating, she served as faculty for several years at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa. In this position, she co-developed and co-led the Dubuque Youth & Family Resilience Project, a community-engaged, interdisciplinary research project that sought to understand factors that predict well-being among families during the COVID-19 pandemic. She joined the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health as a research associate in 2022. Her involvement in health disparities research in DPH sparked her passion for public health and cancer disparities research. In 2023, she was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship through the American Cancer Society to continue her current work in the department and to further her training in community-engaged cancer disparities research. She was also recently accepted into the Community-Engaged Research Fellows Program at Michigan State University.
Her research primarily focuses on the use of targeted and tailored health education and intervention strategies to promote cancer screening and prevention within underserved and marginalized communities. Within this work, she also seeks to identify and address psychosocial factors at both the group and individual level that can contribute to cancer disparities, such as medical mistrust. She is especially passionate about increasing human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination to reduce risk for HPV-associated cancers and eliminate disparities in HPV-associated cancers among marginalized communities. As part of her postdoctoral fellowship, she is leading a research project that evaluates the efficacy of culturally targeted health education about the HPV vaccine among African American parents in Flint. Alongside this, she is collaborating with the Genesee County Health Department to identify parent-, provider-, and system-level barriers to HPV vaccination and to increase HPV vaccine education and accessibility through partnerships with local healthcare providers.
Selected Publications:
Aspiras, O., Herman, J., Lucas, T., Adjei Boakye, E., Washington, A., & Thompson, H. S. (2024). Human Papillomavirus vaccination coverage in Genesee County: Geographic disparities and the need for community-partnered vaccination efforts. Michigan Journal of Public Health.
Hutchings, H., Aspiras, O., Dawadi, A., Wang, A., Poisson, L., Lucas, T., & Okereke, I. (2023). Willingness for lung cancer screening: Disparities among informed, screening eligible individuals. Annals of Thoracic Surgery Short Reports, 2(2), 161-165. DOI: 10.1016/j.atssr.2023.11.013.
Aspiras, O., Lucas, T., Thompson, H. S., & Manning, M. A. (2023). Medical mistrust,
culturally targeted message framing, and colorectal cancer screening among African Americans. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 46, 871-881. DOI: 10.1007/s10865-023-00415-9.
Aspiras, O., Lucas, T., Thompson, H. S., Manning, M. A., Blessman, J. Dawadi, A., Hirko, K.
A., & Penner, L. A. (2023). Culturally-targeted message framing and colorectal cancer screening preferences among African Americans. Health Psychology, 42(1), 1-4. DOI: 10.1037/hea0001246
CV:
To request a comprehensive CV summarizing Dr. Aspiras’s achievements email her at aspiraso@msu.edu.
