Featured expert
- Shameka Poetry Thomas, PhD, MA, assistant professor of Biomedical Education and Anatomy in The Ohio State University College of Medicine and founder of The Ohio State University Sickle Cell Women and Girls (SWAG) Research Lab.
Shameka Poetry Thomas, PhD, receives Fulbright US Scholar Award
Shameka Poetry Thomas, PhD, MA, assistant professor of Biomedical Education and Anatomy in The Ohio State University College of Medicine, has been awarded a 2026-2027 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to complete her research project, titled “Sickle Cell Disease and Reproductive Health Among Women and Girls: A Comparative Analysis Between Jamaica, Ghana, and the United States.”
From January to July 2027, she will be based at the University of the West Indies Caribbean Research Institute's Sickle Cell Clinic in Jamaica, where she’ll work on a replication study of research she completed in Ghana, West Africa, through the National Institutes of Health Fogarty Global Health Fellowship.
By investigating the complex overlap between sickle cell disease and reproductive health between Jamaica, Ghana and the United States, the goal is to create findings that will inform global health interventions and policy recommendations to reduce adverse outcomes on sickle cell disease, maternal-child health and reproductive health genetics.
Dr. Thomas is a global maternal-child health scientist and medical sociologist whose research incorporates patient perspectives and reproductive health narratives to:
- Explore how patients, especially Black women and families, understand and experience new reproductive and genetic technologies, such as noninvasive prenatal testing for sickle cell disease.
- Disseminate data from more than 75 patient cases of women and girls with and without sickle cell disease across the United States and Ghana.
- Support her research team’s sincere resolve to raise sickle cell disease awareness and patient experience across the nation and the world.
As a Fogarty Scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Global Health and Population, Dr. Thomas conducted sickle cell research at the University of Ghana and the Ghana Institute of Clinical Genetics. In 2023, she founded The Ohio State University Sickle Cell Women and Girls Research Lab.
