Congratulations to KTB Staff Member Kathi Ridley-Merriweather, M.A.

The KTB staff has a new scholar in its midst. We want to congratulate Kathi Ridley-Merriweather, our Communications and Minority Outreach Coordinator, who was recently awarded her Masters of Applied Communication. Kathi has been working very hard for the past three years to accomplish this, and we are all very proud of her.

Throughout the pursuit of this degree, Kathi dedicated herself to merging her interest in communication with her work here at the KTB, which has become a passion. A main component of her assignment for the KTB is to recruit minority women to be more involved in medical research in general, and to become breast tissue donors in particular. Through applying her increasing knowledge to this task, Kathi became interested in the barriers to tissue donation that seemed to be attributable to the cultural backgrounds of potential donors. As the interest turned to fascination, Kathi’s body of work started to grow. The findings from her Master’s thesis, Asian American Women’s Perspectives on Donating Healthy Breast Tissue: Implications for Recruitment Methods and Messaging, will be applied when the KTB holds a collection New York next fall. Another manuscript, African American Women’s Perspectives on Donating Healthy Breast Tissue for Research: Implications for Recruitment, was accepted for upcoming publication in Health Communication, a highly respected health communication journal.

Feel free to congratulate Kathi if you see her, but if you really want to make her day, please get the word out to any friends or family members you may have, who are female and belong to a racial or ethnic minority group, and encourage them to donate their healthy breast tissue to the KTB in Indianapolis on January 21, 2017, in NYC in late fall of 2017, or in Phoenix in the spring of 2018. Kathi says that would be a great graduation gift!