Penn Nursing’s Sara Jacoby, an assistant professor of nursing in the department of family and community health, has been appointed the Calvin Bland Fellow at the School of Nursing. This fellowship is awarded to select individuals in the Schools of Nursing, Social Policy & Practice, and Graduate School of Education, as part of the Penn Futures Project, which was established in 2015 to enhance the health and well-being of area children and families.

Dr. Jacoby has a secondary appointment as an assistant professor of nursing in the department of surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine. She is a senior scholar at Penn’s Injury Science Center and a senior fellow at both the Center for Public Health Initiatives and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. She is invested in community-engaged research that makes an impactful contribution to nursing and injury science.

Dr. Jacoby has created a strong scholarly portfolio focused on addressing the socio-structural determinants of inequities among Black men, particularly as it relates to injury risks and opportunities for recovery. Her work focuses specifically on the structural and social origins of disparities in trauma and violence victimization and how opportunities for injury recovery, restoration, and health are constructed in American cities and healthcare systems. She prioritizes mixed methods and community-partnered approaches in her research and has notable expertise supporting the in-depth qualitative elicitation of the lived experience of injured people impacted by gun violence, racism, segregation, and economic marginalization. Her research has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and private foundations. She is currently serving on the board of directors of the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research.

Dr. Jacoby has presented her work locally, regionally, and nationally, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the American Sociological Association, and the National Quality Forum. She was given the Rising Star Research Award by the Eastern Nursing Research Society in 2019. More recently, Dr. Jacoby received the department of family and community health’s research award in 2022 and was named a 2022 fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.