Assistant Professor
University of Kansas School of Nursing, University of Kansas Medical Center
Kansas City, Kansas
Amanda Emerson, PhD, RN is an Assistant Professor in the University of Kansas School of Nursing where she teaches theory and research methods in the PhD and MS/DNP programs. Dr. Emerson's research has focused on understanding individual, interpersonal, and systemic barriers and facilitators to sexual health for women and girls who have a history of criminal-legal system involvement. That work has included studies to understand and find ways to promote women’s self-efficacy to manage systems and relationships and access health services for cervical cancer prevention in contexts that are often complicated by long-term poverty, homelessness, trauma, substance use, and mental illness—as well as resilience, generosity, and humor. Through her work on the Sexual Health Empowerment (SHE) team in the Department of Population Health at KUMC, Dr. Emerson has been funded since 2015 as a research associate and co-investigator on grants from the National Cancer Institute/NIH (PI, M. Ramaswamy).
Dr. Emerson has received funding for her research as a principal investigator, including a pilot award to explore perspectives on sex, sexual health, and sexual health care in older adult women (age 50 and older) with a history of incarceration. The SAGE study was subawarded by the Aging Research in Criminal Health (ARCH) Network from the National Institute on Aging/NIH, R24AG06517. In 2021, Dr. Emerson was funded by the International Association of Forensic Nurses to measure burnout, COVID-related anxiety, and moral distress in sexual assault nurses during the COVID shut-down. Dr. Emerson’s current work on accelerated aging is sponsored by a Frontiers Scholar Mentored Career Development (KL2) Award, a CTSA grant from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) awarded to Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute (KL2TR00236). Dr. Emerson has been Associate Editor at the journal Public Health Nursing since 2017 and serves as a Section Councilor for the Public Health Nursing Section at the American Public Health Association.
