Larelle Bookhart

PhD student, Nutrition & Health Sciences

April 8, 2021

Larelle Bookhart first became interested in public health as a tool for prevention of chronic disease in communities of color. As she progressed through her education, she narrowed this focus. During her MPH in Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bookhart served a lactation consultant and worked with the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Through these roles, she became passionate about designing and implementing nutrition interventions related to maternal and child health (MCH).

Bookhart applied for a PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences at Emory to continue her work on MCH interventions, particularly for populations that historically have not received funding and attention. She has gained several intervention experiences through this program. At Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Bookhart worked on strengthening counseling for early breastfeeding and infant nutrition practices and evaluated a fruit and vegetable prescription program.

Bookhart’s most recent work focused on breastfeeding initiation immediately after birth at Grady Memorial Hospital. Through qualitative research, she found that timely, one-on-one lactation support was a very important facilitator to mothers exclusively breastfeeding in the first few days of life. These findings resulted in Grady developing a business plan to hire more lactation support personnel and will serve as formative research for Bookhart’s dissertation.

The Emory MCH CoE funded two years of Bookhart’s PhD program, providing financial support that gave her “the flexibility and the opportunity to explore something that I was interested in and passionate about that responded to a timely need of a local organization.” Bookhart also highlighted her experience at the MCH Southeastern Centers of Excellence Conference in Birmingham, AL, which included a visit to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and related discussions, as an important moment in her training. This experience discussing racial historical traumas with a diverse cohort of colleagues further solidified her passion to address disparities that permeate the current health system.

Bookhart hopes to stay in academia after her PhD, continuing her research on MCH nutrition interventions that target racial and socioeconomic disparities. Community involvement is a central pillar to her research, and she believes respecting the participants as experts and listening to their ideas is instrumental in her work making a difference.