Barbara Guthrie, RN, FAAN

Barbara Guthrie is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Tenured Professor at the Yale School of Nursing (YSN). Her nursing education began at Howard University's Freedmen Hospital School of Nursing where she received a diploma in nursing. Dr. Guthrie received her bachelor's degree in nursing from Boston University, her master's of science in nursing (Family Health) from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her PhD from New York University School of Nursing.

Prior to accepting the position at Yale School of Nursing, Dr. Guthrie held a dual appointment, at the University of Michigan, as an Associate Professor in the Division of Health Promotion and Risk Reduction and Women Studies. Dr. Guthrie also was the Director for Undergraduate Traditional and Non-Traditional Nursing Programs at Michigan and was the Associate Director of a T-32, a Women's Health Disparities Interdisciplinary Training Grant funded by National Institute of Nursing research (NINR). In addition, she was an Associate Faculty Researcher in James Jackson's Program for Research on Black Americans. She also was a member of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender's (IRWG) and the Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center's Executive committees.

Dr. Guthrie's research and health activism-in combination- has afforded her the privilege of working in concert with adolescent girls, from diverse ethnic, social class, and environmental contexts, to identify, to research, and to design ethnic and gender responsive health promotion programs. Always foregrounding the intersectional issues of ethnicity, gender, age, and class, her collaborative research efforts with adolescent females has led to her receiving funding from such agencies as The National Institute of Drug Abuse, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and National Institute for Nursing Research.

Her NCI funding afforded her the opportunity to collaborate with urban and suburban adolescent females in the design, development, and the empirical testing of one of the first gender and ethnic responsive peer-led sexually transmitted infections (STIs)/HIV/AIDS prevention programs titled, " Girl Talk." Evidence of the impact of gender-responsive prevention program is the adoption and implementation of modified versions of this program by selected Michigan Schools and Community agencies, several Juvenile Justice Systems' (JJS) Diversional Programs in the State of Florida's PACE Center for Girls Program, Massachusetts Girls' Programs, Michigan's Vista Maria 's girls program, and more recently a San Antonio Texas' JJS girls' program.

Similarly, Dr. Guthrie's conducted one of the first cross-sectional ethnic and gender responsive theory-driven substance use research studies that examined the dynamic nexus of how race, gender, class, relations, and environmental contexts influence adolescent female's parallel or co-initiation of substance use /abuse and sexually-related behaviors. This research project was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). Dr. Guthrie has systematically published her findings from "Female Adolescent Substance Experience Study" (F.A.S.E.S) and the "Girl Talk" studies in a wide variety of interdisciplinary journals (Journal of Family and Community Health, Nursing Research, Journal of Early Adolescence, Journal of Adolescent Health, and the American Journal of Addiction). As a result, she is asked to speak, and work with various local, state, national heath systems, community agencies, schools, and policy makers to develop gender and ethnically responsive health-related policies and programs.

Her expertise is sought by the various levels of health administrators, providers and policy makers. At Yale Dr. Guthrie will become a strong and persistent voice advocating and engaging communities across the State of Connecticut to foster safe and healthy environments that are responsive to gender and ethnic concerns. This in turn has the potential to afford all adolescents, irrespective of gender, age, race, ethnicity and social class access to high quality health care and health prevention/promotion programs.