Barbara Guthrie appointed the new Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing

Barbara Guthrie, recently designated as the Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing, focuses her research on health promotion and risk reduction programs for adolescent girls from diverse ethnic, social, and environmental backgrounds.

Guthrie, who serves as associate dean for academic affairs at the Yale School of Nursing, is currently the principal investigator of the HIV/AIDS summer intensive program titled “Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholar” funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. She also is an investigator on the Community Research Core at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Guthrie received a diploma in nursing from Howard University’s Freedmen School of Nursing, her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Boston University, her master’s of science in nursing (family health) from Duquesne University, and her doctoral degree from the New York University School of Nursing.

Prior to coming to Yale, Guthrie was director of the undergraduate traditional and non-traditional nursing programs and associate professor in the University of Michigan’s Division of Health Promotion and Risk Reduction and the Department of Women Studies. She also was the associate director of a T-32, a Women’s Health Disparities Interdisciplinary Training Grant funded by National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR).

In addition to NINR, Guthrie has received funding for her research from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). With her NCI funding, Guthrie collaborated with urban and suburban adolescent females in the design, development, and empirical testing of one of the first gender and ethnic responsive peer-led sexually transmitted infections/HIV/AIDS prevention programs titled “Girl Talk.” Schools, community agencies, and Juvenile Justice Systems in Michigan, Florida, and Texas have implemented this prevention program.

Guthrie also conducted one of the first cross-sectional ethnic and gender responsive theory-driven substance use research studies that examined how race, gender, class, relations, and environmental contexts influence adolescent girls’ substance use/abuse and sexually related behaviors. Her findings have been published in Journal of Family and Community Health, Nursing Research, and the American Journal of Addiction, among others.

Guthrie has been appointed to the NIH National Institute for Nursing Advisory Research Council and she serves as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States.