Rebecca Rivera, PhD, and Matthew Nesvet, PhD, are the 2024 winners of the Department of Medicine’s Promoting Inclusion and Equity (PIE) Grants. These $3,000 awards were established by the Department of Medicine to uphold its commitment to inclusive excellence. Proposals are accepted annually for work that addresses issues effecting minoritized communities and creates a more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and just environment.
Learn more about their winning proposals:
Understanding Food Inequity in a Student-Run Eye Clinic
Rebecca L. Rivera, PhD, MPH, CPH
Assistant Research Professor of Medicine
Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics
Project goal: “To better understand how food insecurity is related to eye health outcomes.”
About the Project: Rivera is a public health nutrition scientist, whose research centers around diet, food insecurity and social determinants of health. In June 2024, she began mentoring second-year medical student Gloria Cabrero as part of the IU Medical Student Program for Research and Scholarship (IMPRS).
Together, they studied the high rates of food insecurity screenings within the Eskenazi Health Department of Optometry and raised the question of whether it would be beneficial to implement a similar food insecurity screening within the eye clinic at the Indiana University Student Outreach Clinic.
Funding from the PIE grant will help them to continue this work.
Cabrero serves as co-manager of the eye clinic at the Indiana University Student Outreach Clinic in Indianapolis, making her uniquely suited to oversee research there. She will act as the project lead while Rivera serves as the PI.
Data collected over a period of three to eight months will reveal if adapting provider and patient workflows to be more inclusive of patients with food hardship and poor eye health outcomes can improve health equity, according to the project proposal.
They hope to potentially improve funding for the outreach clinic’s food pantry as well as the eye clinic and expand food insecurity screenings into other clinic departments.
Housing, Disability, and Code-Based Home Removals: Do Racialized Housing and Healthcare Inequities Place People at Risk for Displacement and How Can County Health and Housing Agencies Mitigate Health, Safety, and Sanitation Removal Risk?
Matthew Nesvet, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medicine
IU Center for Aging Research
Project goal: “Identify health and social factors that put people at risk of home injury due to health, safety, and sanitation violations and code-based removal from home and trace removal aftermaths with a quantitative analysis of an original dataset, supplemented by qualitative interviews.”
About the Project: Nesvet aims to understand how factors like racism, access to affordable housing, resources for home upkeep, and access to proper healthcare and home care impact a person’s ability to maintain a safe, clean, and injury-free home that complies with county housing codes.
He will create and implement a data analysis plan to identify which illnesses and healthcare encounters are most frequently result in home removals due to health, safety, or sanitation code violations. He will compare his collected data to county data to better understand how medical and social factors might put certain populations at heightened risk of displacement.
With his findings, Nesvet hopes to facilitate a meeting between local housing advocates, anti-racism activists and disability-awareness groups with Marion County government leaders and IU School of Medicine and Regenstrief Institute experts to discuss implementing a pilot intervention program for those at risk of code-based housing removal.
