Our featured fellow for August is TyKeara Mims, a DrPH student studying Epidemiology at Texas A&M University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Spelman College and a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Community Health Education (epidemiology minor) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

TyKeara became a Bill Anderson Fund Fellow in Fall 2020. Since then, she has served as the Treasurer for the BAF Student Council and as a member of the Fundraising and Fellowship Intake Committees. She also serves as a peer mentor with the BAF Buddies Program.

TyKeara is grateful to the BAF for providing professional development, fellowship, and mentorship opportunities. In 2021, she worked on the Diversifying HayWired Communication project, which brought together members of the BAF, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Natural Hazards Center to develop innovative approaches to connect with marginalized communities that would likely experience disproportionate impacts from a large earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This summer, TyKeara worked as a Research Assistant with the Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic Prosperity, and Resilience— or CHEER—Hub. The Hub explores the tensions and tradeoffs between community goals for managing coastal hazard risk and achieving equity and economic prosperity in Eastern North Carolina and Texas. Launched in 2022 with funding from the National Science Foundation, the CHEER Hub involves researchers from 11 universities and several disciplines.

For the first four weeks, TyKeara studied research methodologies, data management, team science, and government policies at the University of Delaware. For the last four weeks of the program, she worked directly with community members, volunteer organizations, businesses, and state and local governments to understand their experiences with hurricanes and flooding in Eastern North Carolina.

Research Assistants were tasked with completing a research project. TyKeara’s research focused on evacuation decision-making and displacement. At the end of the program, she presented her work entitled “Resilience in the Face of Disaster: Understanding Decision-Making, Displacement, and Recovery Dynamics,” to community members and researchers affiliated with the CHEER Hub. TyKeara also joined the CHEER panel at the 48th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop to share her experiences with the program.

TyKeara’s research interests include risk communication, risk perception, emergency preparedness, and mitigation within marginalized communities. Throughout her doctoral program, TyKeara has participated in numerous research projects related to natural hazards, the COVID-19 pandemic, and incarceration in Texas. Her dissertation research focuses on the impact of community and individual-level factors on adherence to emergency directives in Houston, TX.

TyKeara is a recipient of the Texas A&M University School of Public Health’s (SPH) Dr. Ciro V. Sumaya Scholarship. Within SPH, she has served as the Treasurer for the Epidemiology Student Organization and as a student representative on faculty search committees. TyKeara also served as a Co-Chair for the Disaster Public Health and Healthcare Informatics Track for the 20th Annual Global Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM).

You can find TyKeara’s most recent publication here. Connect with her on LinkedIn here.