The Road to Injury Prevention
Postdoctoral research fellow Elizabeth O’Neal’s (16MPH) self-described “nontraditional route” to injury prevention blends developmental psychology and public health. Parents are an important source of education and guidance as children learn to navigate the world independently. Elizabeth O’Neal researches the role that parents play in teaching kids about safe behavior, whether it’s crossing streets, driving a car, or assessing other potentially dangerous situations. O’Neal is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Injury Prevention Research Center in the College of Public Health, and the National Advanced Driving Simulator at the University of Iowa. She uses virtual environments to study these parent-child interactions with the goal of developing interventions to prevent childhood injuries.
Exploring New Avenues O’Neal completed a PhD in developmental psychology in 2018 and an MPH in 2016 at Iowa. “I had a nontraditional route to get here,” says O’Neal, who earned a BA in communications with an emphasis in public relations at Mississippi State University. Following graduation, she worked in sales, then opened a small business in Birmingham, 10 FALL 2021 INSIGHT
Alabama, with her brother. Unfortunately, she says, “The timing was not good.” After a promising first year, the 2008 economic crisis hit and they were forced to close the business. “I started exploring new avenues,” she says. “I enjoyed the business world but didn’t love it, and decided I wanted to go back to school and pursue a degree in psychology.” While completing a post-baccalaureate program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she volunteered at a lab that conducted injury prevention studies. The experience sparked her interest in research. “We were using virtual environments to train children to safely cross streets, which is why I ended up applying to the developmental psychology program at Iowa,” O’Neal says. “Professors Jodie Plumert and Joe Kearney had a very sophisticated virtual environment.” Once she was at Iowa, O’Neal connected with the Injury Prevention Research Center and started attending the center’s informal networking meetings. She soon realized that psychology and public health often approach the same problems in injury
