An associate clinical professor on Northeastern’s Oakland campus, Jaime bridges science and storytelling to evaluate grassroots healing programs.
OAKLAND, Calif. — The turning point in Maria Catrina Jaime’s career came when she realized she could help people with their health without becoming a doctor.
Before earning her Ph.D. and joining the faculty at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, where she now teaches public health, Jaime worked as a clinical research coordinator on a study examining the effects of a dietary supplement on liver disease.
“I remember sitting in on my first liver biopsy and thinking, ‘I do not want to do that to a person,’” Jaime recalled. “‘But I also realized that I was really great at interpersonal skills. I had a lot more fun talking to our patients.”
She also wondered, why didn’t these patients get the care they needed years earlier to prevent the alcoholic liver disease that made liver transplants necessary?
Jaime, now an associate clinical professor at Northeastern, saw a role for herself in leading health education and prevention. After moving to Pittsburgh to work with a mentor for whom she had worked as her senior clinical research coordinator, she completed her Ph.D. in behavioral community health sciences and began working on various projects that highlighted the importance of collaborating with community organizations as a researcher.
Working with a domestic violence prevention coalition in southwestern Pennsylvania, Jaime helped evaluate a domestic violence prevention program called Coaching Boys into Men, which trained athletic coaches to educate male athletes about positive dating behavior and bystander interventions. The program adapted to replace coaches with domestic violence prevention advocates. Jaime also helped create a training kit for future facilitators.
“I would say that was the highlight of my professional career,” Jaime said, “because it turned into every other kind of study that I’ve done. I realized, ‘Oh, this is why community matters.’”
Jaime returned to California after having a child to be near her family and joined the teaching faculty of Mills College in 2019. When Mills became part of Northeastern, Jaime connected with Alisa Lincoln, a professor of health sciences and sociology on Northeastern’s Boston campus and director of the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research.
Lincoln had already received funding for a community-based research project in Sacramento, working with the Neighborhood Wellness Foundation, a nonprofit that supports youth and adults to recover from childhood trauma.
Leaders at Neighborhood Wellness wanted to find out whether one of their support services — known as healing circles — was making the intended impact. Last spring, Jaime and other members of the research team recommended using an evaluation method called concept mapping, a technique that allows participants and researchers to visually organize complex ideas, explore their relationships, and better understand how they address key research questions.
In this case, leaders at Neighborhood Wellness services worked with researchers to develop questions and prompts, which neighbors and staff later answered. They then sorted through the results and rated responses based on relevance. Concept mapping software finds correlations — answers that are often grouped together than others that are not — and creates a visual and statistical analysis.
Then the community members themselves interpret the results.
“This is really critical, because we the researchers are not interpreting the data,” Jaime said. “Now they have this map and they can start showing the impact that healing circles are actually having.”
And they can make decisions based on those observations.
“Maybe they tailor some circles for young people versus having a session with older folks, or have a men’s group versus a women’s group,” she said. “Participants are actively contributing to the research process, not only are they informing and generating data, they’re interpreting them. The researcher is really just a facilitator and a guide for getting those ideas and concepts.”