Marilyn Stern, PhD, a professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies and member of the Health Outcomes & Behavior Program of Moffitt Cancer Center, recently received a Status of Latinos (SoL) Award for her numerous scholarly contributions to the Latinx community.
Stern is a pediatric/health psychologist whose research has focused on developing health-promoting interventions in oncology and obesity, particularly working with youth from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. Much of her programmatic community-based research focuses on issues related to understanding the psychosocial health and adjustment of Latinx children, adolescents, and young adults – especially those dealing with obesity.
Her successful history of developing interventions for these families and conducting complex, multisite research projects has systematically established the groundwork for her current work with migrant families living in the rural communities in Florida. She has received several grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support this work.
Stern is recognized at the awards ceremony.
She and her team trained promotoras to deliver their health promotion program to families using mindfulness strategies – techniques that were for primarily new for both the promotoras and families. She found that her program, Adaptando Dieta y Acción Para Todos, was both feasible and acceptable, and most importantly, reduced parental stress and improved mindful eating. These findings have been published in top tier journals and serve as the basis for a large-scale efficacy trial currently under review at NIH. Stern and her colleagues propose to conduct a large-scale randomized control trial across several migrant working communities across the state, partnering with Redlands Christian Migrant Association.
Stern also runs a very large bilingual research team, as most of the work her team conducts is delivered in both English and Spanish. In her NIH-funded trial delivering an intervention for children who have had cancer that are obese, nearly 30% of the patient population has preferred to have the intervention delivered in Spanish.