April 22, 2025
In our new Affiliate Highlights series, we are sharing short interviews with members of our community, offering a glimpse into their research, interests, and what inspires their work. This year, we are randomly selecting assistant and associate professors from our Affiliates program.
Each feature includes a few brief questions (nothing too serious!) to help spark connections, highlight new opportunities, and maybe even introduce you to your next collaborator. This month, get to know Tuyet Mai Hoang and Marynia Kolak!
Tuyet Mai Hoang | assistant professor, School of Social Work
What are your main research interests?
My research focuses on addressing racial gendered health inequities experienced by women, infants, and vulnerable communities through community-based and stakeholder-engaged approaches. My research approach is grounded in the principles of intersectionality and community-based participatory frameworks. My research interest focuses on addressing the intersection of racial and gender injustices to improve women, BIPOC and vulnerable groups’ wellbeing. Research topics range from reproductive health equity, mental health, to climate-health work, particularly with communities who have been historically excluded from health and policy decision-making processes.
How do you see your work connecting with others for collaboration?
As a community-engaged researcher and educator, my work prioritizes community engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration as foundational to my research process. I intentionally build teams across disciplines and lived experiences because complex challenges like racism and racial gendered health inequities demand a diversity of voices. I see collaboration as a process of mutual learning, where we challenge assumptions, build trust, and co-create knowledge that is culturally grounded and actionable. Whether I’m working with engineers, doulas, or public health agencies, I try to create space for shared ownership and meaningful engagement so that all stakeholders are active team members at every stage of project development from identifying priorities and sharing experiences to designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions.
Marynia Kolak | assistant professor, geography and geographic information systems
What are your main research interests?
I direct the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab to conceptualize and evaluate places as multidimensional, multi-scalar systems, examining how intersecting experiences of the social, spatial, racial, built environment and structural drivers influence health. As a health geographer I use spatial epidemiology, socioecological theory, and spatial data science to investigate how variations in health outcomes are produced and perpetuated across individual, interpersonal, and area-level scales, with a focus on modeling resource dynamics and multidimensional neighborhoods. As a GIScientist, I also seek to advance new directions in Humanistic GIS research & sociotechnological software development by integrating community-centered design to generate new representations of place.
What is something you’re passionate about outside of work?
It’s so important to make sure that as an academic, we have passions outside of work. It took me a bit of time to get on board after those years of hustle as a grad student and first years after graduating, especially as I was a solo parent along the way. As you start to settle into the long-term experience of being an academic you begin to realize how invaluable your “off-time” is to refresh and reset, supporting better health as well as more invigorating research ideas. I’ve really enjoyed re-learning what I love outside of work, and lately that’s been: hiking, listening to records, embroidery, and playing the piano. I’m not very good at any of those things, but I don’t have to be!