Sharon A. Brown, PhD, RN, FAAN
Joseph H. Blades Centennial Memorial Professor in Nursing
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Nursing
1710 Red River Street
Austin, TX 78701-1499
NUR 5.155 (faculty office location)
NUR 3.450 (research office location)
512 232-4704 (office phone)
512 232-6239 (Fax)
Email Sharon Brown
Biography
Dr. Brown is the Joseph H. Blades Centennial Memorial Professor in Nursing. She has served as the School of Nursing's Associate Dean for Research (2009-2011; 1995-1999) and the University's Associate Vice President for Research (1999-2006). Dr. Brown's work is in the area of health promotion/disease prevention in Mexican Americans with type 2 diabetes. She has had ongoing research since 1992 funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Brown currently is funded for four years by the National Institute of Nursing Research for a meta-analytic study, Meta-analysis of Biobehavioral Determinants of Health Outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes.
Dr. Brown's intervention studies have been conducted in Starr County, an impoverished Texas-Mexico border community that holds the record for the highest number of diabetes-related deaths of any county in Texas; the county is the poorest in Texas and one of the poorest in the U.S. This work focused on developing and testing culturally tailored strategies to address the disproportionate burden of diabetes in Mexican Americans. To date, she has received nine research grants to support investigations of the efficacy of these interventions specifically designed for this population. She has conducted five meta-analytic studies to inform the intervention work. The current meta-analytic study is aimed at testing an explanatory diabetes model in order to more clearly identify those factors that are most predictive of positive health outcomes, considering race/ethnicity, age, and gender.