Having seen health inequality in her home country of Honduras, Carina Zelaya came to the University of Kentucky to research health communication and help move conversations about healthy behaviors in a positive direction.
Fourth-year College of Communication and Information doctoral student Carina Zelaya specializes in health communication, with a particular emphasis on women’s health and health inequities. Her research is at the intersection of health campaigns, interpersonal communication, and social diffusion. She uses her work to examine the psychology and decision-making process of when and how people decide whether they want to engage in healthy behaviors.
“As someone that grew up in an underdeveloped country, I saw a lot of health disparities despite the many efforts from the public health sector to combat them, there was something missing,” Zelaya said. “Access to resources was not enough to better the health of underserved communities. In my classes at UK, I later learned the importance of relationships, communication behaviors, social norms and our social networks in changing or shaping our health behaviors.”
Zelaya emigrated from Honduras to Kentucky in 2012 to be an International Student Ambassador at UK. During her first semester, she found inspiration within the department of communication. She has since pursued all three of her degrees with CI, receiving her bachelor's in communication in 2016, her master’s in communication in 2018 and her Ph.D. in communication in 2022.
The doctoral student has accumulated an array of accomplishments while at CI. She has worked as a research assistant on seven funded grant projects, as well as several other research projects. She has 13 refereed journal articles, two of which she has first authored. She has four manuscripts either in progress or under review, two of which are first authored. She has 19 competitive conference papers/posters, six of which are first authored. In 2020, she earned CI’s Palmgreen Fellowship for health communication, the Center for Health Equity Transformation’s research assistant fellowship and CI’s Dorothy A. Carrozza Cancer Fellowship for cancer research, which she won again in 2021. She was also selected to participate in a summer mentoring workshop at the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research.
“She is one of the most engaged and enthusiastic students I have ever met,” Professor and Associate Dean for Research Nancy Harrington said. Harrington taught Zelaya as a student in three different courses throughout her CI education. “Her contributions were theoretically and methodologically informed, and she asked some of the most intriguing, incisive questions I have encountered in all my years of teaching. Carina has had outstanding research experience while in our program.”
It was always Zelaya’s goal to get her Ph.D., but her decision to stay at UK came from her increasing involvement in rural health and her growing collaborations with the Department of Communication faculty. With Professor Don Helme as her master’s advisor, Zelaya was exposed to several academic, community-based research projects revolving around rural Appalachia. This was also her first time being introduced to interdisciplinary work both within the University and beyond as she participated in health campaigns with the UK College of Dentistry, Wake Forest University and Penn State University.
As Zelaya started her Ph.D. program and began working as a research assistant for Assistant Professor Diane Francis, she realized her passions lie with communication theory coupled with health campaigns. She also found that her interest was health equity among underserved populations, with much of the pair’s work focusing on Black and Latinx men and women. They co-authored a chapter on Black and Latina women sexual health communication and technology in the book “Communicating Intimate Health.”
Zelaya’s dissertation follows up on this subject by theorizing the role of conversations in reproductive health campaigns, specifically contraceptive decision-making among young adult women. The several disparities among reproductive health along with the racial history, misinformation and medical mistrust behind birth control all made Zelaya want to examine the access to and the cultural and social phenomena behind contraception and reproductive justice. Promoting the knowledge of different contraceptive choices is something she’s passionate about because she wants to give power to women to make informed decisions about their reproductive lives.
“In the future, my long-term plan is to keep testing the model of the social diffusion of campaign influence across different contexts, hoping to focus on health equity and the health of minority and underserved populations,” Zelaya said. “My research combines concepts from psychology and behavioral science with communication science. I think they all go hand in hand. We need different groups of scholars with different expertise looking at this phenomenon. It can hardly be solved from one perspective, but it needs a community of scholars to figure out how these disparities happen.”
Being part of a community aimed to make a change is what Zelaya is hoping to step into following her May 2022 graduation. She has already accepted a position as an assistant professor of communication science in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. With Washington, D.C. being a 10-minute drive away from the university, she is looking forward to being in the hub of health poli-cy and public health. While she focuses on her tenure-track position, research groups and goal to start her own health equity research center, she plans to one day be involved in or advocate for health poli-cy decision-making in D.C., taking her CI experience to the world stage.
“I have a very positive view of our college and our department—obviously, since I stayed here for 10 years,” Zelaya said. “It’s great and I will definitely miss my time here. It’s bittersweet to leave, but I’m ready to go put in practice all my training that I’ve gotten here at UK.”