Predoctoral Fellowship: Natalie Malone

Position Description: The Sexual health, Erotic life, and pleasure eXperiencing (SEX) Assessment, led by B. Ethan Coston (they/them; Associate Professor (beginning July 2022), Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies), intends to award Natalie Malone (doctoral student, Counseling Psychology at University of Kentucky) as the project’s Director of Strategic Partnerships and Community Impact for the first project year (July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023; title tentative). The project is initially funded through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas: Exploring the Future to Build a Culture of Health program, which supports projects that advance health equity and offer “unconventional approaches and breakthrough ideas that can help lead the way to a future where everyone in the United States can live their healthiest life possible.” The SEX Assessment is aimed at bringing together community members, students, scholars, policymakers and field experts to learn as much as possible about the pleasurable and positive aspects of sexuality. Using knowledge gained from daily dairies, focus groups, cognitive interviewing, and survey data, the multidisciplinary research team will measure and assess the breadth and depth of the sexuality prism, including sexual beliefs, desires, patterns of behaviors, and identities, with a focus on assets such as identity pride, community consciousness, self-esteem, affirmative models of consent, aspects of pleasure (including feelings, behaviors and physical outcomes), affirmative health behaviors and health-related outcomes. Together–and, with the goal of establishing a sustainable sexual health research center/institute–the team will inform meaningful and comprehensive community level sexual health initiatives, state and/or federal level sexual health education policies, and institutional/grant-funder priorities for sexual and gender minoritized health. Scope of Work The primary responsibilities of the fellow are to work independently and with the larger project team to recruit and retain community members and content/practice-expert interlocutors, plan and run Steering Committee meetings, and liaise with the Steering Committee regularly about project updates, specialized knowledge needs, and in-person/localized participant recruitment. Additionally, the fellow will help to coordinate multi-site focus groups and spend additional remaining time researching best practices in community-based research and strategic partnership impact assessment. The predoctoral fellow will gain training/mentoring in and be co-responsible for: Multidisciplinary collaboration and peer-reviewed publishing Project management Team meeting leadership Institutional Review Board study protocols Qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis Grant writing Conference and other professional presentations, workshops, and/or trainings