Alexandra Fenton, a recent Master of Social Work alumna of the Brown School, has clinched the title of “Realest Person on Earth.”
For a lot of people, it doesn’t get more real than a visit to the gynecologist; the sterile exam room, the paper gown, awkward small talk, and legs in stirrups. Fenton captured a moment of unfiltered authenticity during a pap smear and submitted it to BeReal’s global “Realest Person on Earth” competition. The photo sharing app lets users post a photo of themselves and their surroundings during a randomly selected two-minute window every day. For the competition, it challenged users to share their “WILDEST, RAWEST, MOST EMBARRASSING, UNHINGED, BeReal” moments.
Explaining her submission choice, Fenton said: “I’d say that the photo that I submitted was my funniest, most unhinged ‘bereal’ that I have taken so it just made sense to send in that one. I am getting a pap smear in the photo,” she explained.
BeReal launched the competition on Oct. 4. With over two million submissions worldwide, Fenton stood out among the 50 finalists, ultimately securing the votes needed to win.
It’s been a whirlwind period for Fenton, who graduated from the Brown School with a Master of Social Work degree on Dec. 9, just a week after winning the competition on Nov. 30. Following graduation, she relocated to her hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, to be closer to family and friends. Currently, she’s preparing for her licensure exam and involved with a suicide and crisis hotline.
Reflecting on her time at the Brown School, Fenton expressed gratitude for the connections made and highlighted a particularly memorable class.
“One of my favorite parts of being at the Brown School was my class with Dalychia Saah, assistant professor of practice, where we led classes and developed sex ed curriculum for adults. I had an early morning section, so I got to communicate with people from all over the world. I’m also very grateful for the friends and connections that I have made,” Fenton said.
A dedicated BeReal user, Fenton regularly shares daily glimpses of her life on the platform. As the “Realest Person on Earth,” she has won a $15,000 vacation to any destination in the world, BeReal swag, and the honor of having her winning submission displayed in iconic locations including New York’s Times Square. She also has the privilege of choosing BeReal’s notification time for a day. She’s considering picking her birthday for this special occasion.
As she contemplates her vacation options, she finds herself torn between the allure of a Mediterranean cruise and the enchantment of the Galapagos Islands. Did we mention she gets to bring along three friends.
Kim Thuy Seelinger, research associate professor at the Brown School, visiting professor at the School of Law, and director of the Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, led the review and drafting process for the International Criminal Court (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor’s new policy on gender-based crimes.
The new policy, launched Dec. 4 at the United Nations during the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties annual meeting, focuses on the investigation and prosecution of gender-based violence that manifests as war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide.
“This is the first ICC policy to explicitly take a survivor-centered, trauma-informed approach to our investigation and prosecution work,” Seelinger said. “This is critical for the well-being of those we engage and also the quality of the evidence we put forward.”
The policy will have impact well beyond the International Criminal Court, Seelinger said.
“It will provide guidance to over 120 countries that have signed the Rome Statute, such as Canada, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Sweden and the United Kingdom — countries that co-hosted the launch event at the U.N.”
Panelists including Judge Belkis Izquierdo Torres, vice president of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia, and Anna Sosonska, chief of Ukraine’s special prosecution unit for conflict-related sexual violence, said they plan to integrate the policy into their domestic work. Experts from civil society also will use the policy to guide their documentation and investigation work, she said.
“Now that we have a strong new policy, we can focus on operationalizing it, both in and beyond the Hague,” Seelinger said. “I will look to my faculty colleagues at WashU to help, given the wealth of dissemination and implementation expertise we have here.”
WashU’s Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration facilitated the consultation process with external experts from July through September. In addition, 2023 WashU law graduate Max Karakul served as a research assistant. Now an intern at the International Criminal Court, he attended the launch event at the United Nations.
Seelinger is an expert on sexual and gender-based violence in the context of armed conflict and forced displacement. She is currently on leave from the university to work with the ICC, where she serves as the court’s first senior coordinator for gender-based crimes and crimes against or affecting children.
“I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Kim Thuy Seelinger for leading the policy review process, guided by Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan,” said Karim A. A. Khan KC, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Seelinger previously served as Khan’s special adviser on sexual violence in conflict.
“This new policy represents a concrete commitment by the ICC to prioritize gender-based crimes, which are often underreported,” Seelinger said. “It’s an important step for the court to create a safe place for survivors to tell their stories.”
Seelinger also co-drafted and edited the ICC Prosecutor’s new Policy on Children, which launched Dec. 8 at the United Nations.
Paz Galupo, whose research focuses on the intersection of sexual orientation and gender identity, was installed as the Audre Lorde Distinguished Professor in Sexual Health & Education during a Nov. 6 ceremony at Washington University in St. Louis.
Galupo, who uses both they and she pronouns, joined the university’s Brown School this academic year from Towson University, where they were a professor of psychology.
The newly endowed professorship was established in honor of Lorde, a self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” who dedicated her life and creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia.
A formal installation ceremony and reception were held in Hillman Hall’s Clark-Fox Forum.
“Paz Galupo’s groundbreaking research on the most marginalized groups in the LGBTQ+ community has led to a greater understanding of those communities,” said Dorian Traube, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. “I welcome Professor Galupo to the Brown School and am excited about this professorship named in honor of such an influential writer and activist.”
“It is fitting that Paz Galupo is the inaugural recipient of a professorship named in honor of Audre Lorde, who was a major contributor to ideas around sexuality and race,” Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said. “I am confident that Professor Galupo will continue Audre’s work to further our understanding of marginalized communities.”
Galupo’s longstanding research program, The Queer/Trans Collective for Research on Equity & Wellness (QT-CREW), centers on those most marginalized in the LGBTQ+ community. QT-CREW conducts community-based research to ensure that the lived experiences of queer, transgender and QT-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) are reflected in the scientific literature and to create knowledge designed to improve their lives and well-being.
Galupo’s work utilizes the larger theoretical frameworks of minority stress and intersectionality to consider minority experience and also to understand how larger systems of racism, sexism, cissexism, heterosexism and binary ways of thinking systematically exclude and invalidate individuals at the margins and subsequently how that impacts social experience and creates health disparities.
Galupo’s installation address was titled “Your Existence is Resistance: Resilience, Joy and the Weaponization of Queer & Trans Identities.”
Galupo is editor of the Journal of Bisexuality and associate editor of the International Journal of Transgender Health, the official journal of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
A fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), Galupo is editor of its journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Galupo serves on the APA task force updating guidelines for psychological practice with transgender and nonbinary persons.
About Audre Lorde
Lorde was born in New York, N.Y., to West Indian immigrant parents. Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies and queer theory intertwined her personal experiences with broader political aims.
Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class and gender in canonical essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Her early collections of poetry include “The First Cities” (1968), “Cables to Rage” (1970) and “From a Land Where Other People Live” (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including “New York Head Shop and Museum” (1974), “Coal” (1976) and “The Black Unicorn” (1978), included powerful poems of protest.
Lorde’s honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College, she was poet laureate of New York from 1991-92. She died in 1992 at age 58.
The United States and Nigeria may be an ocean apart, but each has distressingly high rates of infant and maternal death in the year following childbirth. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the U.S. maternal mortality rate to be nearly 33 deaths per 100,000 births — about 10 times higher than such rates in several other high-income counties. And in Nigeria, it’s much worse: According to the World Health Organization, the rate is more than 530 deaths per 100,000 births.
To reduce these numbers and save lives, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Abuja in Abuja, Nigeria, have received grants to work with community organizations in St. Louis and Abuja, with both projects partnering with Parents as Teachers, a national organization in the U.S. that has long provided support to young families through home visits. Building on the existing home-visiting model, the goal of these programs is to improve cardiovascular health for the mother during pregnancy and for the entire family following delivery. The funds, from two grants totaling $9 million, are from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world,” said cardiologist Mark Huffman, MD, a professor of medicine and co-director of the Global Health Center at Washington University. “And in the U.S., Missouri also has high rates of death during and soon after pregnancy. Many of these deaths are due to hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, especially high blood pressure that can lead to heart failure, seizures, strokes and death. Tragically, these are often preventable conditions. We know what works to lower blood pressure, and the programs we are developing here and in Nigeria are intended to get those interventions to the people who need them most.”
The programs will help families manage their cardiovascular health, and embed healthy eating, physical activity, stress management, sleep and tobacco prevention information and activities within the Parents as Teachers’ curriculum. The teams will aim to help participants control other risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including body weight, blood pressure and blood sugar during and after pregnancy. The researchers will follow the families’ progress, continuing home visits and data collection until the children reach age 2.
“We are taking a multigenerational approach to improving cardiovascular health in families by targeting interventions to the earliest stages of pregnancy and childhood,” said cardiologist Victor Davila-Roman, MD, a professor of medicine, of anesthesiology and of radiology at the School of Medicine. Davila-Roman also serves as director of the Global Health Center, a joint effort between the Institute for Public Health and the Department of Medicine at Washington University.
In St. Louis, the program — Enhancing Cardiovascular Health Equity in Mothers and Children through Home Visiting — is led by principal investigators Debra Haire-Joshu, PhD, the Joyce and Chauncy Buchheit Professor in Public Health at Washington University, Davila-Roman, and Rachel Tabak, PhD, an associate professor at the Brown School. Washington University’s program is one of the seven clinical centers funded to do similar work across the U.S. as part of the NIH’s Early Intervention to Promote Cardiovascular Health of Mothers and Children (ENRICH) program.
In Nigeria, the newly funded program — Enhancing Intergenerational Health in Nigeria: Peripartum as Critical Life Stage for Cardiovascular Health (ENHANCE-CVH) — is led by principal investigators Huffman, who has had long-standing collaborations with colleagues at the University of Abuja; Davila-Roman; Dike Ojji, MBBS, PhD, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Abuja; and Godwin Akaba, MBBS, an associate professor and an obstetrician and gynecologist at the University of Abuja.
“We are excited about these two programs, because they promise to be so interactive,” Haire-Joshu said. “There will be so many opportunities for us to learn from one another about the best ways to impart knowledge of cardiovascular health to new, young families. We anticipate learning about new strategies in Abuja that also can work here in St. Louis and vice versa. This is a perfect example of the local-to-global — and back again — collaborations that we’re interested in building between St. Louis and communities around the world.”
Added Dike Ojji, of the University of Abuja: “This program is so important, because cardiovascular diseases and the risk factors, such as hypertension, are the most common causes of mortality and morbidity during pregnancy in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. We are hopeful the program will receive support from the Federal Ministry of Health of Nigeria as it aligns with their policy of reducing maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality.”
In both St. Louis and Nigeria, the researchers are working with Parents as Teachers, a national organization that started and is based in St. Louis. Trained professionals with Parents as Teachers support young families through regular home visits during pregnancy and early childhood, with the aim of partnering with parents to support their child’s development; support positive parent and child interactions; improve parenting practices; boost child and family school readiness; and improve family, caregiver and child health, among other goals.
Past studies involving this program indicate that home visits with young families help them develop healthy habits that nurture early childhood development. The hope is that adding the latest heart health science to the existing approach will cultivate new habits that improve the cardiovascular health of the entire family. Such habits, once established, ultimately also could improve the health of future generations.
“Collaborations between Washington University and Parents as Teachers go back some 25 years,” said Allison Kemner, senior vice president and chief research officer for the Parents as Teachers National Center, which is headquartered in St. Louis. “With this latest partnership, we are taking health interventions shown to help with weight control and diabetes management, for example, and embedding them into the existing Parents as Teachers program. When Washington University brings the science and Parents as Teachers brings the practice with the families, together they can have a powerful effect.”
In Nigeria, the researchers will adapt interventions developed with Parents as Teachers in St. Louis and implement them in Abuja, training community health workers and nurses who work as community health educators to deliver messages about heart health during regular home visits.
The programs will focus on families at highest risk of cardiovascular disease burden, including Black and Hispanic families in St. Louis, families experiencing socioeconomic disadvantages, those affected by obesity, and those in which the parents have a primary school education or less.
First-year MSW student Octavia Bartmess came to WashU at a time when her career and life were changing. She moved to St. Louis with family, including her three children, ages 8, 10 and 13, and stepped back from a decade-long career as a software engineer before the pandemic. This presented an opportunity for her to not only change the course of her career trajectory, but to also explore and connect with her Indigenous identity as a WashU Buder Scholar.
“I do think that the program [at the Buder Center for American Indian Studies] has allowed me to grow and better understand my own identity,” said Bartmess whose concentration is in American Indian/Alaskan Native studies. “This offers an opportunity for Indigenous people to come together, to make space to explore what it means to be Native, and to listen to the experiences of other Indigenous people.”
Although she grew up in Albuquerque, N.M. with a Diné mother and a Spanish-American father, Bartmess, like other Indigenous students at WashU, said that she grew up with her Diné culture adjacent to her.
“As a child, we visited my Diné family, but it wasn’t totally part of my upbringing,” said Bartmess. “I didn’t participate in Diné rituals, and I wasn’t taught certain things because my mom was still trying to find her own way with her culture. Now I am an older student trying to go back into the community and learn things for myself.”
Like Bartmess, Victoria Meza, also a first-year MSW student with a concentration in American Indian/Alaskan Native studies, said that WashU’s Buder Center is giving her a place to more fully explore what it means to be Navajo and Assiniboine Sioux. Meza, who grew up in Kamas, Utah said that living in urban areas has impacted her family’s ability to immerse themselves in their Native culture, and by extension, their Native communities. Because of that, she has struggled with her identity and what it means to be Native American.
“Because I didn’t grow up on a reservation or know the language or cultural practices, I felt like I didn’t necessarily have permission to own that Native side of me, but it’s becoming more of a conversation about how to support Native people who live in urban areas, because now, there are more Native folks living in urban settings than on reservations,” said Meza.
Ashlyn Newcomb, a second-year MSW student concentrating in American Indian/Alaskan Native studies, said that like her peers, she too has experienced the challenges of what she refers to as living in two different worlds. Even though her tribe – the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma – has a strong government, language program, and cultural holidays and ceremonies to nurture a sense of belonging, being a Native person can be lonely.
“I feel that WashU tries to make Native students feel supported and heard,” Newcomb said. “But living in two worlds is a difficult task that all Native students struggle with. We made the choice to come here to better our communities, but it can be a very lonely process. We need more Native students at WashU. As Native students, we feel marginalized even more because there aren’t a lot of us on campus.”
Newcomb mentioned that she is often mistaken for Hispanic or even Middle Eastern when it comes to her ethnic heritage and race, and that even as a child, her family worried when she decided to attend a tribal college, Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.
“They were worried I wasn’t Native passing enough to attend, and might struggle because I am too white passing,” said Newcomb. “There’s this ever-present tension in Native identity where you’re too Native for one group, and not Native enough for another, and that can create a lot of confusion and challenges.”
That is why for these three students, talking about and celebrating Native heritage is more important than ever.
Bartmess said that as she reflects on her Diné heritage and her upbringing, she now speaks more to her children about Indigenous philosophies and ways of knowing like the Four Directions and Seventh Generation Thinking.
“I am so grateful that our Diné culture still exists today and that I am here to help pass on traditions and values to my children said Bartmess,” Our people have survived eradication, removal, and forced assimilation; thus, I am here to witness contemporary Indigenous youth reclaim their culture. I wasn’t thinking and talking about this stuff when I was my kids’ age, not even with my Indigenous family. All of this, I learned much later in life, and it was something I had to look for.”
Each of the scholars came to WashU with similar hopes – to gain the knowledge and tools to help improve the Native American experience within the constructs of contemporary society.
“The biggest tool Natives can use to learn about their heritage is to know you can talk about it,” said Meza. “Even if you feel like an outsider, learn about that heritage. It’s scary at first, but there’s no other way to get to know your heritage. Show up. Ask questions. Help us grow as a community and celebrate who we are.”
Three scholars from the Brown School have been named to the Highly Cited Researchers 2023 list by Clarivate, an analytics company.
Ross Brownson, the Steven H. and Susan U. Lipstein Distinguished Professor and director of the Prevention Research Center; Byron Powell, associate professor and co-director of the Brown School’s Center for Mental Health Services Research; and Enola Proctor, research professor and director of the Implementation Research Institute, are among the more than 50 Washington University researchers featured on this year’s list. Notably, the trio have received repeated recognition from Clarivate for their research. Since 2014, Brownson has been featured on the list nine times, while Powell and Proctor have each been recognized five times.
Established in 2001, the annual list identifies scientists and social scientists from around the world who demonstrate significant and broad influence in their respective fields, as evidenced by the frequent citation of their papers by peers over the past decade. Highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field and publication year in the Web of Science, a Clarivate tool.
This year’s list recognizes 6,849 researchers from 67 countries and regions. For a comprehensive list of the researchers recognized for work they accomplished at WashU, visit the Clarivate website.