January 15, 2025

Spotlight: Sharon Laing puts community first, and the rest follows

If there is one person you can always count on to be out in the community seeking opportunities for growth, change and improvement, it is Dr. Sharon Laing.

Laing, an associate professor in the School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership at University of Washington Tacoma, uses community-based health research to better understand the needs of the community while ensuring equitable healthcare solutions are offered to structurally marginalized communities.

“There is a need to engage with the community and not be siloed in a lab at a university setting, reading research papers and doing these kinds of experiments that are divorced from what the community is experiencing” Laing said. “It does them a disservice, because whatever you come up with may not even fit their needs, because you never engage them in conversations about what their needs are to begin with.”

Laing initially studied Developmental Psychology at McMaster University in Canada and received her Masters and PhD at Howard University. She began participating in community-based health research at Howard University’s Cancer Research Center, where she educated African-American women, with a family history of breast cancer, about the importance of regular screenings.

After her time at Howard, Laing transitioned to postdoctoral physiological research at Rutgers University, investigating neurotoxicant exposure and the health effects linked to chemicals found in paints inhaled by New York City bridge painters. She followed this work with a second post-doctoral opportunity at UW School of Public Health’s Health Promotion Research Center.

Laing’s research led to a faculty position at UW Tacoma’s School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership in 2015, where she used her interdisciplinary research to build research knowledge and community among BIPOC students, and led efforts to address faculty workload across UW Tacoma.

“The multidisciplinary approach gives you a very broad assessment of what the needs are of the communities that you’re working in and helps to identify the different factors that can be impacted,” Laing said. “Having these different kinds of perspectives, whether it’s cancer prevention, whether it’s environmental science, whether it’s digital healthcare management, really gives you a bigger perspective because you recognize how research intersects.”

In addition to her academic pursuits, Laing is an associate faculty member at the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center, where she studies the role of School Resource Officers in high school and middle school settings. She was also recently appointed as the interim associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at the Seattle campus’ School of Nursing, where she plans to assist in promoting equity, inclusion and belonging in the School’s affiliated settings.

Laing is currently the lead investigator of a Population Health Initiative Tier 2 pilot grant project studying the prevalence of burnout among healthcare professionals at a community health center in Snohomish County. The project aims include evaluating the presence of burnout among clinical services staff, identifying evidence-based strategies to reduce burnout among clinical services staff and understanding the feasibility of the identified strategies aimed at promoting the well-being of healthcare professionals.

One of Laing’s aspirations for this project is to initiate an organizational shift in how the healthcare workforce operates, with less of a focus on delivery and more of an emphasis on how to make the outcome less burdensome to reach.

“I think that when we consider how to organize human labor, we tend to focus on the more we put in, the better the outcome,” Laing said. “But I don’t agree with that. I think we need to think really carefully and take a step back to figure out what type of outcome we want and how to make it less burdensome for people to get things done.”

Laing’s Initiative-funded project began in April and her research team is currently crafting a survey that will help identify sustainable interventions based on the community-health center’s priorities and resources. Laing’s team plans to pursue additional funding in order to expand their research to multiple community health centers and test multiple interventions to understand how they could be generalizable at centers across the country.

“Because we got funding, we were able to establish relationships with community partners and able to compensate health care providers to participate in this research,” Laing said. “Through this work, we were able to understand even more about burnout as it relates to community centers, in a way that we would not have known had we not begun this work.”

Laing believes that interdisciplinary research holds the key to successful community-based health research, attributing funds like those from the Initiative as an opportunity to expand prior knowledge on community health and improve the lives of healthcare workers and patients as a result.

“Interdisciplinary research forces us outside of our comfort zone and helps us recognize how a particular discipline can inform us that what we felt was such a narrow area of research is not so narrow after all,” Laing said. “It’s those interdisciplinary conversations that enhance the work being done … [and] the Population Health Initiative can truly make a difference in communities by forcing us to speak to each other.”