Intergenerational Health and Community-Centered Research with Dr. Kimberly D'Anna Hernandez
In this inspiring episode of Our Roots Say That We’re Sisters, Dr. Kimberly D'Anna Hernandez, Associate Professor of Psychology at Marquette University, shares her remarkable journey navigating academia as a Chicana, a single student-parent, and a trailblazer in stress biology research.
Dr. Hernandez reflects on the intersection of her identity, life challenges, and professional aspirations, highlighting how her lived experiences have shaped her research into social and cultural stressors, intergenerational health disparities, and community-based mental health initiatives.
From her roots in zoology and behavioral neuroscience to her current work addressing medical violence and systemic inequities in Milwaukee’s perinatal care systems, Dr. Hernandez emphasizes the importance of community-engaged research and the power of cultural representation in higher education spaces. She also offers an honest look into her personal journey, balancing her roles as a mother, researcher, and mentor.
Episode Highlights:
04:36 - I was trying to merge my identities because the whole time I was in graduate school, I was actually trying to leave. I couldn’t figure out where I fit. My people weren’t the people in my cohort. I was part of a single-parent group that was mainly women of color.
07:10 - Community-engaged research is about equity. You meet with community partners, talk about their needs, and design a project together that you both own and have voice in. It takes real time to build those relationships.
15:50 - I always want to show gratitude to those who came before me, whose shoulders we stand on, and whose legacy we’re lucky to be a part of. But I also want to keep DEI initiatives alive despite the fear-mongering against them. It’s dangerous not to name that we’re striving for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Interview:
What’s the story you'd like to share with us today?
01:23 - I'd like to talk a little bit about how I started out and got here because in some ways the path is traditional, and in some ways it's not. I was a zoology major. I always liked animals, and that's what I thought I was going to do. But I was also a Chicano activist when I was in undergrad. It was a real duality of identities and bringing those together. How were they going to play out? Was I going to have to choose one or the other to go forward? Along the way, something else happened to me—I was a student parent. I had my son when I was a junior in college. Unlike many of my peers who were going out and doing things, I was a single parent taking care of a kid in a one-bedroom apartment, going to class. I remember eating to stay awake, those types of things. I had a professor at the time. My son was born in April, so I wasn’t done with finals yet. I had to tell most of my professors that I was pregnant and how I was going to plan to finish the semester. One professor told me, "If you're not in class, there's nothing I can do for you." So I gave birth on Sunday, and I was back in class on Thursday. Now I know more, but at the time, I was young, I didn’t have much mentorship, and I didn’t know what to do. Putting all of those things together shaped what I do now. I had basic training in stress biology in my PhD and combined it with my roots as a Chicana and my activism to look particularly at sociocultural stressors—things like racism and discrimination—and their effects on the Latinx population and pregnant women, and how those things change and program stress responsivity and biology. This has consequences for the intergenerational transmission of health disparities and mental health risk. I think finding that has really pushed my journey forward in a way that I’m not sure would have happened without all those things coming together.
Are you from Milwaukee?
03:38 - I'm not from Milwaukee; I'm from Michigan, actually. I got my PhD in Madison, but coming back was a decision after being a professor for 10 years in San Diego at Cal State San Marcos, which is in North County, San Diego. I'd been gone for about 15 years. I'm the only one in my family who really moved away, and my kids started to not be able to tell my sisters apart. That’s when I realized it was time to go home. My family now lives in Illinois, so Milwaukee got me close enough.
Zoology and Psychology? What are you working on now in terms of research?
04:12 - Interestingly, I’ve only ever taken one psychology course. I took Psych 101 my senior year as my last course. I’m not a psychology major at all, but I did behavioral neuroscience, using animal models to understand things like maternal behavior, which was the focus of my PhD. When I went to look for a job after my postdoc, I had transitioned from working with animal models because I was done with that at the time. I was trying to merge my identities throughout graduate school, but I struggled to figure out where I fit. My lab was great, but my people weren’t in my cohort. I was part of a single-parent group that was mainly women of color, and that group got me through. I still have those friends 20 years later; one of them lives five minutes from me, and we grew up together, as did our kids. That support sustained me throughout. When I moved to human studies, it felt like getting another PhD in three years. I didn’t know how to collect data from people who could actually tell me something. I wasn’t sure where I fit because I was no longer doing pure biology, but I also wasn’t trained as a developmental psychologist. Psychology departments, though, are broad, often including social, cognitive, and neuroscience areas. Behavioral work, like early primate studies on maternal neglect, has traditionally fit within psychology, biology, and physiology, so that’s how I ended up in a psychology department.
What are you working on now in terms of research?
06:02 - Currently, I’m working on several projects. One is a birth cohort study in California where we recruited about 400 women during early pregnancy and followed them until their children were six years old. We’ve been measuring discrimination, acculturative stress, mental health, and stress-related hormones like cortisol to understand how these factors influence infant emotional regulation at birth and beyond. Here in Milwaukee, I’ve become more interested in medical violence and obstetric racism during the perinatal period. We’ve partnered with community organizations like UCC and 16th Street to recruit women and reflect on their experiences with medical providers, doulas, and midwives. We’ve been examining how these experiences affect postpartum depression and cortisol levels to explore stress relationships. This work is community-based, meaning we approached the community with an idea and found partners, as opposed to community-engaged work, where you collaborate with key stakeholders to design a project equitably. In our community-engaged project, we’re working with UW-Milwaukee and St. Aldebert Church, one of the largest Spanish-speaking parishes in Milwaukee, to develop a community mental health program that could be disseminated to other institutions. These projects take a long time, and I’d say that only in the past year have these efforts started to take off. It’s all about relationships. I think about community-engaged research all the time because the community isn’t just a subject—they’re equal partners and beneficiaries of the work. It’s not about something you write up in a journal. I struggled with this for years. When I transitioned to human work, I wondered who was actually reading the research. So, we’ve been working on a mental health series to share these findings with the community. If it’s just sitting in a journal, what’s the impact it’s actually having? That’s the question I keep asking.
How has your identity informed the choices that you've made career-wise and otherwise?
09:15 - I think my identity has greatly informed what I do. Like I said, I was always trying to reconcile these two things, and I still struggle with it. Just because I’m a Chicana doesn’t mean I have to focus on that, right? I could have been a Chicana doing animal work, and that is needed too because the way questions are asked and answered is very different when there are diverse voices at the table. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed there, but for me, the satisfaction in my job and the impact I’m having comes from rolling my identity into my work, which has made it incredibly meaningful for me. I work with graduate students and undergrads, and we’re an entirely Spanish-speaking lab. We amplify the voices of students who have those lived experiences—about half of our lab is from Milwaukee, specifically the South Side. These students engage with their community, drawing on the resources and experiences they’ve had, and many have recruited participants from places they’ve lived, schools they attended, and community centers they’ve been a part of. Some students have said there’s no other space at Marquette where they can have this kind of discourse or cultural connection. Being a part of that with students who share my identity is a really powerful thing.
Where are you situated on Marquette?
10:51 - We’re situated in Kramer for the most part, and we actually have what we call a dry lab and a wet lab. In the dry lab, we handle all of our surveys and related materials, while in the wet lab, we have the capability to process all of our own samples with centrifuges, freezers, and beakers. I have students working in both labs. My team includes students from biology, nursing, sociology, and psychology because the work we do spans many different disciplines.
Tell me about how the mural project has resonated for you and what's the impact?
11:28 - When I came to Marquette, I was looking at the different spaces, and I think the mural had such a large impact on me. Oftentimes, I’m not walking on that side of campus, but if I am, I make it a point to pass by the mural. I think it’s important for students to see themselves reflected, and honestly, for faculty like me to see ourselves reflected too—because there aren’t that many of us. We recently got an NSF grant for a project called Persist, which stands for Positionality, Empowerment, and Research in STEM. It’s a program for first- and second-year students of color in STEM, because we know that students of color often leave STEM after their first year. Research suggests this happens because there’s no discussion about race and ethnicity. STEM is often portrayed as neutral or colorblind, but that’s obviously not true because it doesn’t reflect the real world. These students often move to other majors that address those issues. The Persist program is an 18-month initiative that supports Black and Latinx students from their freshman year through the end of their sophomore year. When we started and introduced ourselves, the students said, "This is what we’ve been looking for. This is what we want—a space where we can gather and be together." For me and Blake Turner, another professor involved, it was just as exciting to see that space being created. Thinking about the mural and how it inspires these kinds of spaces at Marquette is impactful. It reminds us that we need to think about these things all the time. We need to be culturally auditing—not just the spaces but also the places—and the murals are such an inspiring representation of that.
What women of color have been inspirational for you?
13:23 - I think I’ll give a somewhat obvious answer and then some less obvious ones. So much of my Chicano identity was shaped by the Chicano movement. Dolores Huerta is obviously a huge influence. When I was really starting on this journey, she was someone we looked up to. I haven’t "met her, met her," but I did see her talk and shook her hand. We shared a space for a moment, and it was incredible to see how hard she worked alongside Cesar Chavez. She’s still doing the work—she’s a lifelong activist—and that’s what I hope to be. Beyond that, part of the reason it’s so important for me to create spaces like Persist and another program I run called URISE, which is for juniors and seniors, is because of the impact of a program I was part of at Michigan State called Charles Drew. Charles Drew was an African American doctor, and the program was entirely for Black and Latinx students. All the TAs, professors, and staff were also Black and Latinx. We lived in the dorms together, had smaller classes, and were cohorted. The woman who ran the program, Dorothy—I can’t remember her last name—made such an impact. But the most important person for me was a Biocalculus teacher. Coming into a university with 40,000 students, she got me through. Without that program, where I was primarily taught by Black women, I don’t think I would have made it.Now, when I think about my contemporaries and teach culturally validated pedagogy to faculty, I reflect on how I wasn’t taught about many pioneers. I didn’t necessarily have access to them, but that’s different now. When I think about guest speakers or the people I teach about, I’m uncovering historical women and teaching about them. But I’m also calling on people I know right now—like my friends Bianca, Fantasy, and Erica—to come and talk to my classes. I show students the women of color who are currently doing this work and succeeding. I think of these women constantly as sources of inspiration.
What impact do you hope to have on women of color, not only those coming behind you but those who have already sort of gone ahead of you but are looking back?
15:42 - I always want to show gratitude for those that came before us, whose shoulders we stand on and whose legacy we’re lucky to be a part of. For those coming up, things are changing so much, and it’s happening fast. I want to keep that change going amidst everything happening right now. The government has come out saying to back off of DEI initiatives. There was even a report saying the NSF was doing too many DEI initiatives. I have an NSF grant that is one of those initiatives. Blake Turner and I put in a five-million-dollar grant to fight systemic racism in STEM at Marquette. I’m not going to back off doing that work because it honors those who came before us and those who are going to come up behind us. I struggle with it sometimes because I know people are averse to conflict. For example, when people were against talking about climate change, they just changed the language to "differences in atmospheric pressure." I get that, but I think it’s different and dangerous if we don’t explicitly name diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. By not naming it, we’re losing something critical. Even though the current climate discourages it, and even though folks at Marquette might be conflict-averse, I think it’s dangerous if we don’t do that. That’s something I hope to continue as part of my legacy.
What do you do to take care of yourself? What's your self-care?
17:29 - Not much. I work a lot. Honestly, I’ve had kids since I was 20 years old, so I don’t think I ever had time to develop other interests. I have two more kids now—they’re 13 and 15—and my youngest has autism. A lot of my spare time has been focused on him. At one point, we had nine appointments a week between ABA, speech, occupational therapy, and everything else. So, a lot of my time has centered around them and my work. I do like to read, though. When I fly, that’s my treat to myself. My flying treat is a People magazine—because, let’s be honest, we all say we don’t like gossip, but we do. Evolutionary, we’re wired to like gossip, so whenever someone says, “I don’t want to gossip,” I’m like, “Go ahead, it’s normal!” I also grabbed a trashy crime novel because I don’t want to think too hard. Those are my real indulgences. I should do more self-care. It’s not really my forte. One thing I will say, though, is that I’ve really focused on fostering my female friendships, and that’s what holds me down. I have a best friend in Tennessee and a best friend in California. We talk every single day—on the phone while we’re driving here and there—and that’s what has really kept me grounded. Many of them are in academia; actually, I think they’re all in academia. We share and talk about our work, what’s going on, and even what TV shows we’re binge-watching. That’s always my icebreaker in class: “I need a new show—what are you watching?” Those friends and those friendships give me so much energy.
What are your hopes for the future?
19:27 - I think over the years, things have changed and flowed, and I’m always trying to plan. But the community-engaged work I’m doing in Milwaukee is so exciting. Along with two professors, Lisa Edwards and Kamitha Victor Swarman in counseling education, we have a multicultural perinatal mental health collaborative. It engages folks across Milwaukee, from places like 16th Street to smaller nonprofits. We’ve hosted a social where people came together, really wanting to work collaboratively. There are lots of great maternal mental health initiatives across Milwaukee, but the issue is that they don’t interact. There’s no common space for them to come together. I think strengthening that network is important, and being part of it is exciting. Milwaukee has some of the worst rates of maternal mortality and morbidity among Black and Brown women. If we could have any impact on that, it would be huge. We’re currently working on a preventative postpartum depression intervention—something that could be delivered by anyone in healthcare, not just mental health providers. Maternal mental health is deeply connected to these outcomes, so if we could make an impact, that would be great. I also hope it inspires more students, especially students from those communities and cultures and Spanish-speaking students, to get involved. One barrier identified by the church is the lack of Spanish-speaking providers in the community. Even if people want to seek help, the resources just aren’t there. Promoting initiatives like these and keeping DEI efforts a priority is critical. We can’t give in to the fear-mongering. I’d call on Marquette to continue making this a priority. Don’t back off or follow what others are doing—stand firm and commit to it. When we have a critical mass of people willing to stand up and advocate for these efforts, that’s how we move forward. I think about the sacrifices others have made, and I remind myself that I can say the words. I can stand up and speak out. And I will.
What would you like the community to know about you and your journey, whether it's the Marquette community or the community beyond?
21:48 - I want people to know that there are many ways to get to where you’re going. Sometimes things that look like barriers might actually be challenges in disguise. Had I not faced some of those challenges—like being a single student parent or being one of the only Chicanas, or the only one, in my graduate program—those experiences shaped who I am now. It doesn’t have to be a traditional path. What really matters is how you feel about the impact you’re making. There are things happening at Marquette for those willing to stand up and say something. So come find us, collaborate with us, and tell us
