Minority Health Disparities

Rick Bevins is a member of the Minority Health Disparities Initiative leadership team. His research program bridges areas of neuroscience, pharmacology, animal learning and cognition, psychology and immunology. He uses animal models as a tool to elucidate factors involved in the etiology of drug abuse.

Sociologist Kimberly Tyler studies dating violence and substance misuse among college students and youth experiencing homelessness. She has published multiple research articles examining how dating violence and campus sexual assault are influenced by mental health, racial or ethnic background, substance misuse and sorority membership, among other factors. Other topics of interest include child abuse and neglect and HIV risk behaviors. In August 2022, she and her team were awarded a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study risk factors and coping behaviors among youth experiencing homelessness and create a “just-in-time” personal support intervention tool using a mobile phone app. Tyler is the George Holmes University Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and serves as the co-director of the Longitudinal Networks Core for UNL’s Rural Drug Addiction Research Center. She teaches upper-level courses on families and family violence. (Updated January 2025.)

Kathryn Holland is the director of the Sexual Assault and Sexual Health (SASH) Lab, where she and others study a variety of issues related to sexual assault and sexual health—with the goal of helping people, especially women, live safer and healthier lives. An assistant professor within both the Department of Psychology and the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Holland joined the university faculty in 2017. She works within both disciplines to investigate how people’s health and wellbeing are influenced by their social environments, focussing on formal support systems, social norms, and interpersonal processes.

Dr. Jordan Soliz is a professor who studies communication and intergroup processes primarily in family and personal relationships. Current projects focus on communication in multiethnic-racial families, interfaith families, and grandparent-grandchild relationships with a goal toward understanding communicative dynamics associated with individual well-being and relational-family solidarity. He also investigates processes and outcomes of intergroup contact and intergroup dialogue as well as communication processes that minimize outgroup attitudes (e.g., ageism) and/or buffer effects of discrimination.

Elizabeth Clausing is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is particularly interested in how stress can impact the body through epigenetic inheritance via DNA methylation in mothers and children. She is especially interested in how early childhood experiences (e.g., low socioeconomic status, childhood adversity) can affect health in adulthood. Her work is interdisciplinary, bridging anthropology, public health, and genetics. Clausing received her degrees from the University of California-San Diego and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.