Kayla S. Ingram

I have been in my field for almost a decade now - 2 years for my postdoctoral research, 6 years for my graduate research, and 2 more years of research during undergrad, so about 10 years total. Currently, I serve as an adjunct professor at both Coppin State University and Morgan State University, both HBCUs, while simultaneously working as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I've been doing both roles for 2 years now, teaching 4 semesters total. At Coppin State, I teach Intro to Biology for Non-Science majors, and at Morgan State, I teach Genetics for science majors. I am a graduate of an HBCU myself, and I wanted to go back to my roots and provide opportunities and create opportunities for students like me. I really wanted to make a difference in students similar to me, where I wanted to expose students to different opportunities aside from the traditional paths. When we go into science majors, we only believe that we can be medical doctors or nurses, and so I wanted to expose them to research opportunities and other industry fields or clinical fields. My research specifically focuses on breast cancer health disparities and cancer therapy resistance. I do disparities research, where I'm looking at breast cancer differences, or outcome differences between Black and white women in Maryland specifically. It's mostly epidemiology, and I was really excited about this research because we're looking into the social determinants of health that contribute to these differences in underserved areas, exploring why Black women tend to have worse outcomes for breast cancer than their counterparts. Exploring these differences and learning more about how the systems around us contribute to our health is a reason why I wanted to pursue research. Creating opportunities in research capacity at HBCUs related to this field is something that I'm passionate about as well.