Posted 12/04//2006

Arnold School  alumna is co-founding editor of new
 academic journal dedicated to health disparities

USC alumna Dr. Melva Thompson-Robinson has added a new title to her list of academic credentials. 

She is the co-founding editor of the Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, a quarterly, online periodical published by the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

Thompson-Robinson says the idea for the brand-new journal was hatched about a year ago when she and colleague Dr. Michelle Chino were chatting about how difficult it was to publish health disparities research in existing academic journals. 

The two “kicked around the idea” before deciding their peers deserved a publication they could call their own, a place to not only share research but the hands-on aspects of health disparities practices, said Thompson-Robinson, an assistant professor in the UNLV Department of Health Promotion. 

“The work of these professionals must be shared with others in order to build a congruent knowledge base from which new insights can be gained,” the founders explained in an editor’s note in the Nov. 22 inaugural issue. 

Setting out to build a product from scratch, the pair decided to put the journal on the Web as an Adobe PDF document, a format that not only looks good online but can sent to a printer with a couple of keystrokes. 

(To access the journal, point your browser to: http://chdr.unlv.edu/JHDRP.htm.  To read it, you’ll need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. It is a free download available from Adobe.com at http://www.adobe.com/.) 

For the next couple of months, the co-editors spent hours online, e-mailing colleagues and posting notices on listservs in an effort to create an editorial board, a cadre of reviewers and a collection of manuscripts. 

“We were happy with the response,” said Thompson-Robinson, who earned her doctorate from the Arnold School in 1998. “We ended up with enough manuscripts that we could pick and choose for the first issue and have material left over for a start on the second.” 

The inaugural issue has 130 pages.  There are six articles from public health professional plus a submission by a student. 

The articles are fully footnoted and cover a wide array of health disparities issues, ranging from prostate health outcomes to HIV/AIDS in gay African-American men and the lingering health effects of mass trauma – colonialism, slavery, ware and genocide – on following generations.

Thompson-Robinson was born at Ft.  Jackson, the daughter of Raymond and Ineesa Thompson.  As part of a military family, she remembers traveling widely but ended up as a longtime resident of Lakeside-Marblehead, Ohio. 

She started college at the University of Michigan where she received her bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, the study of the motion of the body.

Later she received her masters in physical education concentrating in sports physiology and adult fitness from Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. 

After working for over three years as a physical fitness Instructor at the Nevada Test Site, she returned to South Carolina and obtained her doctorate from the Arnold School’s Department of Health Promotion and Education in 1998. That same year she was named the department’s outstanding doctoral student. 

After finishing her degree, she worked with Dr. Donna Richter, then chair of HPEB. The relationship still continues. Thompson-Robinson is director of scholar advisors and faculty relations at the Institute of HIV Prevention Leadership.  Richter is executive director of that organization which trains administrators of HIV prevention programs.

Prior to joining the faculty at UNLV, she was an assistant professor of behavioral science and health education in the Institute of Public Health in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Florida A&M University.

Thompson-Robinson was named 2004 Teacher of the Year in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at FAMU.

She is happily married with four children ranging in age from infancy to 16 years, and a beagle named Thelma.

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