Research earns award for Gray
(pictured above: DeOnna Gray is a DCCC adjunct instructor.)
Davidson County Community College adjunct instructor DeOnna Gray is the recipient of a 2014 College Educators Research Fellowship.
Gray, who oversees DCCC’s Healthcare Interpreting Program, will use the $1,500 award to support her research project, “How do you feel? Me duele el estómago: The Cultural Health Habits of the Hispanic/Latino Patient.”
The UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center, awards the fellowship. With it, Gray will have access to both UNC and Duke’s vast library collections and resources with which to conduct her research.
Gray will develop a semester-long online lab module focused on the cultural health habits of the Hispanic/Latino patient, incorporate and use research materials to benefit healthcare interpreting courses offered at DCCC and work with DCCC’s director of international education to develop an event to share her findings with DCCC students. As part of the fellowship, she will also present at the UNC-Duke Consortium Conference, to be held Feb. 13-15, 2015.
“As an adjunct instructor of healthcare interpreting at DCCC, I know that through this research, I’ll be able to better develop students’ professional identities as culturally sensitive healthcare interpreters,” Gray says. “Graduates of DCCC’s healthcare interpreting program will be able to effectively facilitate intercultural communication between patient and provider because they will have a greater understanding of the influence of culture on health practice.”
In addition to her research project, Gray will enroll at East Tennessee State University this fall to pursue a Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in Community Health. The program prepares individuals to assess, plan, conduct and evaluate public health programs using collaborative organizational and community skills.
Gray is a graduate of Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism and earned a Master of Arts in Spanish: Translating and Translation Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In 2009, she was one of six students chosen for Wake Forest University’s Teaching Healthcare Interpreting graduate pilot program. She has previously taught Spanish at DCCC, Wake Forest and UNC-Charlotte, as well as courses at other colleges and universities in North Carolina and Ohio.
