Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Julia Roncoroni

Colectivo sat down with Dr. Julia Roncoroni, assistant professor of counseling psychology at Morgridge College of Education, to chat about her ongoing research with the immigrant community in Denver. Read below to learn more.

Interviewer: So my first question is just for you to tell me a little bit about yourself, your career path, and what the trajectory of your work and your research has been so far.

Dr. Roncoroni: Sure. I was born in Argentina, I lived there 25 years. I was a kindergarten and 1st grade teacher before I moved to the US. I did that for seven years and I moved to San Diego when I was 25. I did my undergrad in psychology at San Diego State, got my PhD at the University of Florida, did my doctoral internship at Harvard Medical School, then spent another year in Florida, and then moved to DU to be faculty.

Interviewer: Okay, and I am wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your research. I know you work in immigration

Dr. Ronocorni: Yeah, so my research is mostly in two buckets. One of those buckets is in patient-centered, culturally sensitive healthcare, and the other one is health promotion research, or culturally sensitive, culturally relevant health promotion. A lot of the work that I do in both of those buckets is with immigrants, primarily Latinx. In the patient-centered, culturally sensitive healthcare bucket, I am now partnered with Denver Health. We just finished one study and we're starting another one now. The first study was looking at how Latinx patients perceive indicators of cultural sensitivity in their doctors. So how do they understand competence and sensitivity and other indicators? The second study that we're launching now is looking at whether implicit bias in urgent care and emergency providers informs their clinical use or prescription of opioids. And then in the other bucket of health promotion, mostly what I do is trying to understand what variables predict engagement in health promoting behaviors. So things like stress, hope, and how those might predict engagement in physical activity, sleep, and healthy eating. We’ve done a lot lately with sleep and Latinx communities. We look at what are motivators and barriers for healthy sleep within Latinx communities? What are things that they might need in terms of social determination so that sleep can get better in duration, better in quality? And then I also have designed health promotion programs in the community where essentially we design a program, go to the community, implement it, and then evaluate it--did it work? Did it not work? How can it be tweaked? All that.

Interviewer: Are both of these buckets part of the Health Disparities Research Lab? 

Dr. Roncoroni: Yes. We have a lab at Morgridge. It depends on the quarter, but we have about 8 to 10 students ranging from undergrad to post-docs… they’re all engaged in these studies and are actually running them, to be honest. They do a lot of this work; they collaborate with me like a professional would.

Interviewer: I’m curious if you could share some of the most recent, most interesting findings you’ve had working with the immigrant community.

Dr. Roncoroni: Well all of them are interesting to me [laughs]. It depends on how you define “interesting.” For us, I think the most interesting part of our work is that it’s dual community and participatory, and that the outcomes of our work go straight back to the community. So we publish, sure, in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, but we also give back. It’s not just academia-serving. We create flyers and brochures… as an example, we conducted a study in 2019 where we did focus groups with Latinas in Denver trying to understand what motivated them to get healthy sleep. So we looked at the association between sleep and health quantitatively, but we also asked them in focus groups what motivated them to sleep well and have healthy sleep habits, and then what were barriers that got in the way: things like being worried about la migra, or missing family in your home country, not feeling the social support that you would in your home country. The things that motivate them--and we know this from other research in health promotion behaviors--are their family and their children, especially among Latinx populations. After that, we created a manuscript and it was published, but then what we did too was condense the results in a way that was accessible to the community, and we went back and gave them those results in a visual format that they could grasp better and be more interested in than a peer-reviewed publication. And we do that any time we conduct research. We did it last year, in 2020, we did a study with an organization in Lakewood, in a pretty underserved neighborhood called Westwood. We looked at how sleep was impacted during COVID-19 and then we created a conference presentation about that, but we also created a visual report that we gave back to the agency that they could share with their constituents.

Interviewer: I love that you always have something that you can give back to the community. How can students get involved in the research lab?

Dr. Roncoroni: It’s very difficult to get involved. You send me an email and then you’re in [laughs]. The students came up with this but call our lab a “familia,” and collectively we have come up with some ground rules for engagement. Things like if you are going to participate in a study, you have to see the full spectrum of the research process. So if you want to publish on something, it matters to us that you participate in data collection and data analysis. And all of us have different skills. Data analysis is not my thing as much so I work with statisticians who can teach me about the process. I am very good at partnering with community, and some of my students may need more help with that, so we all participate within our skills and interests. All of us who are involved in any specific project participate in the whole project, and that to us is meaningful in that I don’t think it’s possible to write about a community unless you understand the community and have seen it directly, and so that's where that comes from. We ask that students stay with us at least two quarters to a year, ideally a full year. We have lab meetings where we all meet to talk about the work that we're doing, questions that we have, how we're doing. We ask that all the students participate in those meetings. So those are the more formal pieces. If you send me an email and say you are interested, I usually meet with people to understand how or why they're interested in this, and we go from there. So it’s easy to get involved.

Interviewer: If somebody wanted to read your research or see something that you’ve published, where do you recommend they find it?

Dr. Roncoroni: So I have a DU Portfolio page, if you google “DU Portfolio Julia Roncoroni,” it has a tab for my research, a tab for my teaching, and most of my publications are linked there. My DU Portfolio also has my CV, where all of the publications coming out of our lab are listed, and most of them are accessible via the DU Library. So if something is not hyperlinked in that portfolio page it’s easy to access via the library. The last resource would be sending me an email if something is not accessible. I’m happy to share.

Interviewer: Okay, so now I want to talk a little bit about your Winter Interterm course: Immigration enforcement, Human Rights, and Social Justice. Can you tell me a little about it and what students can expect from it?

Dr. Roncoroni: Right, yes, so the class runs for a week this year. This year specifically it runs from December 13th to December 17th. It is worth 4 credits, and it has two levels, so whether you’re an undergrad or a graduate student, you can participate and we give you slightly different work so that we account for graduate students being graduate students. The class concentrates on the impact on individuals and communities of the immigration policy that we now have in the USA. Because it's a week long class, it only concentrates on one aspect of immigration, and we understand that it's not full scope, but it's the best we could do with the time that we have. So we mostly look at the enforcement of public policy regarding undocumented immigrants at the border and also within the US. We have several faculty who come and speak, so this is the class that I co-teach with a PhD in the community who’s an ethnomusicologist, a music anthropologist, and we’ve been teaching together for many years, but we also have guest faculty from different programs like law, sociology, and social work that come and speak about their area and understanding of undocumented immigrants and current policy. We also have many community members come and speak. So last year, for example, we had the director of Casa de Paz, Sarah Jackson, come and speak to us. We had many DACA recipients come and speak with us, and undocumented people come and speak with us. And then the final, which to me is probably one of the coolest pieces of the class... we don't have a final paper. In our class, the final assignment is a documentary. Someone from the community comes to teach two hours a day for that whole week how to create a documentary on the experience of undocumented immigrants. So students interview an undocumented immigrant from the community and then for the final assignment they create a documentary--quick, like three or four minutes--where they show their understanding of the interview and the history and biography of the individual that they interviewed.

Interviewer: That's very cool. I’m curious which immigrant and refugee organizations you are involved with on campus and outside of campus.

Dr. Roncoroni: Many. The first thing that comes to mind, I am co-writing a book, an ethnographic cookbook, with Casa de Paz where we cook with immigrants and we informally interview them while we cook with them. You know, like, “what’s your experience? Can you tell us a little bit more about your immigration process and your life in the US?” And we use food, cooking, and eating, as a medium to get that going. Like I said, last year I worked with Westwood Unidos. Westwood primarily serves undocumented Latinx immigrants. I also work a lot with the Latino Community Foundation of Colorado, and within my work with them we often engage their grantees. Vuela for Health is another organization I work with, that’s where we did the Latina focus groups related to sleep. I work with other organization that are Latinx-serving, like Denver Health, and at some point I worked with Kaiser too. Most of my work, nearly all of my work, is community engaged, community participatory, but I also work with individuals. For example, before the pandemic we had a program at Morgridge where we would bring community caterers to our events so they had the opportunity to share their experiences and lives and needs. And then we worked to see how we can actually be a university that's oriented for the public good, right? How do we meet those needs? How do we support growth in the community?

Interviewer: So because I am a counseling psychology student, I’m very interested in the intersection of mental health and immigration. What is something that you think most people don’t know about this population?

Dr. Roncoroni: I think when we think of Latinx communities--and they are not the only immigrants to the US, but I work primarily with that population--but I think across the board when we think of undocumented immigrants or refugees, we often think of how underserved they are, and we don't think of how resilient they are. Some of the people that we work with in the community have had very, very challenging lives and they are doing just fine. They are fighting, they are advocates, and they are partners. I wish when we talked about Latinx people, we brought them to the table too, to hear some of this side, some of the resilience in this community.

Interviewer: Thank you.