ESPERANZA VALENCIA

University of Arizona

Esperanzav@arizona.edu

Esperanza is an incoming Junior studying Psychological Science and Physiology and Medical Sciences with minors in Spanish and Health & Human Values. She was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona and has a strong desire to practice medicine in a border community. Her professional goals include medical school with a desire to become a general surgeon or practice family medicine. Esperanza is currently the treasurer of the Minority Association of Premedical Students where she has had the opportunity to volunteer at ZMansion, a resource for the Tucson houseless community. Additionally, she is a member of the Student Health Advocacy Committee and has organized health education workshops for local elementary students. She shadows a trauma surgeon and will be working with a DO family medicine doctor in the fall at an El Rio Community Health Center. Esperanza hopes to work in a similar organization where she can focus on mental and emotional health, decreasing stigma in communities of color and preventative health.

⊲ PROJECT

The Differences in Reasons to Breastfeed Between Mothers Who Do and Do Not Have Opioid Use Disorder

Esperanza is working with the RENEW (Recovery through Engaging and Empowering Women) team in analyzing data from the Orchid study. The Orchid study hopes to answer the question “Could hormones help women avoid using opioids in the postpartum period?”. Participants complete multiple studies before and after giving birth and Esperanza is focusing on the question “What are your top three reasons to breastfeed?”. This research project hopes to determine if there is a difference in the reasons behind breastfeeding between mothers who do and do not have opioid use disorder and are participating in the Orchid study. This has the potential to be used in further Orchid and RENEW team research in understanding motivations to breastfeed.

Alicia Allen

PhD, MPH Associate Professor, Clinical Translational Sciences

Aliciaallen@arizona.edu

Alicia Allen, began working in clinical research on substance use disorders in 2001 as an undergraduate student. This experience prompted her to obtain her masters in community health education, graduate certification in addiction studies and doctorate in social and behavioral epidemiology, all from the University of Minnesota. She also completed a fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the area of prenatal smoking. As a behavioral epidemiologist, she is particularly interested in research study design and evaluating causality.

She has conducted randomized clinical trials, controlled cross-over trials, and cross-sectional online surveys, as well as analyzed data from large epidemiological datasets. Dr. Allen’s current research focuses on topics that occur in the intersection between substance misuse (e.g., nicotine/tobacco, cannabis, opioids) and women’s health (e.g., pregnancy, postpartum, hormonal contraceptive use). Alicia has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, ClearWay Minnesota, and University of Arizona.

She has published over 45 peer-reviewed manuscripts to-date, primarily with Addictive Behaviors, Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Addiction, and Journal of Addiction Medicine. She is an associate editor with Nicotine Tobacco Research (NTR), the clinical director with Society for Research on Nicotine Tobacco University (SRNT-U), and co-director of the Resident Scholarly Project Program (RSPP). In 2020, Dr. Allen received the prestigious National Institutes of Health’ New Innovator Award to explore how postpartum hormones influence relapse to opioids.