A Cal State Fullerton assistant professor of health science is the recipient of a 2017 Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship.
Wura Jacobs is working with Covenant University in Nigeria to design a data repository that can house information from a pilot study on adolescent health risks and behavior outcomes, as well as future health studies of the thousands of adolescents across the country’s six geopolitical zones.
“There are scant reliable data on topics such as Nigerian adolescents’ health literacy and perception toward substance use,” said Jacobs, who traveled to Africa in May to help fill the data vacuum and build research capacity alongside Nigerian faculty and students.
Funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the fellowship program is designed to reverse Africa’s “brain drain” — the emigration of highly trained and educated individuals — and develop long-term collaborations among universities in Africa, the United States and Canada. Some 282 fellowships have been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013. Jacobs is among 43 scholars awarded fellowships this year.
Continuing her research here at Cal State Fullerton, Jacobs has invited interested students to participate in the international health project.
“The project exposes CSUF students to global health issues and provides them with the opportunity to help with instrument design and validation, literature search and abstracting, data management and manuscript preparation,” said Jacobs.
A resident of Chino, Jacobs joined the Cal State Fullerton faculty in 2016. She holds a Ph.D. in health education from Texas A&M University.
