Dr Luseadra McKerracher (she/her) is currently leading the SPOONS team, and is also both a Junior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies at Aarhus University and an Incoming Assistant Professor at AU's Department of Public Health.
Dr McKerracher has close to a decade of experience working on research and community engagement projects related to maternal, infant, and adolescent health and wellbeing in a number of different contexts including urban Canada and rural Fiji and Guatemala. You can read a bit more about her here and here, see websites for other projects she's involved in here and here, and check out her most up-to-date list of academic work here.
Hamda Waberi (she/her) was a master's student at the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University who graduated top of her class in 2023. She has a variety of research interests including the development, implementation, and evaluation of complex health interventions; identifying and measuring health inequities; and community-based health promotion.
Hamda held an integral role in the SPOONS team, co-leading many of the team's research activities, including recruitment of participants through door-knocking and community outreach; coordinating and facilitating interviews and focus groups; transcribing, translating, and co-analyzing interviews; assisting with the development and design of the SPOONS surveys and various promotional and communications materials; and collating and cleaning anonymized data. She also managed her own sub-project on how food insecurity in families with small children is perceived, depending on the socio-demographic perspective of the perceiver. She is leading the development of this project into an academic publication, with Ibrahim, Egal, and McKerracher as co-authors.
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She is fluent in Danish, English, and Somali.
Gali Ibrahim (she/her) completed a Master's of Public Health at the Department for Public Health at Aarhus University in May 2022.
As a member of the SPOONS team, she led her own sub-project, which focused on the ways food (in)security and housing (in)stability and other neighbourhood factors might affect when to have children and how many children to have for families living in Gellerup, Aarhus. She also co-managed the larger SPOONS project between Feb 2021 and Jan 2022, including doing study promotion work, community and stakeholder engagement, data collection/ interviews, and data analyses.
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Her broader research interests include health promotion and community health, particularly with women who are new immigrants to Denmark. She speaks fluent Danish, English, and Somali. You can find out more about her work here.
Hamdi Egal completed a Master's of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark and carried out an internship/practicum as a research assistant with SPOONS in Aarhus.
Her many and essential roles with the SPOONS project included project co-management responsibilities; participant recruitment; data collection (coordinating and carrying out interviews); data collation (transcribing, anonymizing, translating, cleaning interviews); and assistance with drafting, development, and design of communication and promotional materials (fliers, posters, email scripts).
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She speaks Danish, English, and Somali fluently.
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Julia Labricciosa (she/her) was a SPOONS team research assistant during her 4th year as a Health Sciences Student in the Child Health Specialization at McMaster University, Canada. She has subsequently completed a post-degree training in Nursing.
During her 8 months as a research assistant at SPOONS, with Kate Taplin (see below) and with mentorship from McKerracher, Julia co-ran a systematic review, which aims to investigate the extent to which housing and food insecurity intersect to affect pregnancy health outcomes. The systematic review protocol can be found here. Julia and Kate have presented the preliminary results of this review at the 2022 McMaster University Child Health Conference, where they won an award for best student-led research, as well as at the DOHaD World Congress in Vancouver, BC. The team is now developing a manuscript based on Julia and Kate's data collection and analyses.
Julia’s research interests include equitable healthcare for all pregnant people, mental health concerns during pregnancy, midwifery care, and reproductive health.
Katherine Taplin completed a Bachelor of Health Sciences at McMaster University in 2023, before going on to Medical School at the University of Ottawa. During her 2nd year at McMaster, she was involved in the SPOONS project as an undergraduate research assistant, collaborating closely with Julia Labriccosa (see above) on investigating the impact of housing and food insecurity during pregnancy via a systematic review. The protocol for the review is available here.
Kate's general research interests include maternal health, fertility, oncology, and immunology.