In this inspiring episode of Our Roots Say That We’re Sisters, Dr. Kimberly D'Anna Hernandez, Associate Professor of Psychology at Marquette University, shares her remarkable journey navigating academia as a Chicana, a single student-parent, and a trailblazer in stress biology research.

Dr. Hernandez reflects on the intersection of her identity, life challenges, and professional aspirations, highlighting how her lived experiences have shaped her research into social and cultural stressors, intergenerational health disparities, and community-based mental health initiatives.

From her roots in zoology and behavioral neuroscience to her current work addressing medical violence and systemic inequities in Milwaukee’s perinatal care systems, Dr. Hernandez emphasizes the importance of community-engaged research and the power of cultural representation in higher education spaces. She also offers an honest look into her personal journey, balancing her roles as a mother, researcher, and mentor.

Episode Highlights:  

04:36 - I was trying to merge my identities because the whole time I was in graduate school, I was actually trying to leave. I couldn’t figure out where I fit. My people weren’t the people in my cohort. I was part of a single-parent group that was mainly women of color.

07:10 - Community-engaged research is about equity. You meet with community partners, talk about their needs, and design a project together that you both own and have voice in. It takes real time to build those relationships.

15:50 - I always want to show gratitude to those who came before me, whose shoulders we stand on, and whose legacy we’re lucky to be a part of. But I also want to keep DEI initiatives alive despite the fear-mongering against them. It’s dangerous not to name that we’re striving for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Interview:

What’s the story you'd like to share with us today?

01:23 - I'd like to talk a little bit about how I started out and got here because in some ways the path is traditional, and in some ways it's not. I was a zoology major. I always liked animals, and that's what I thought I was going to do. But I was also a Chicano activist when I was in undergrad. It was a real duality of identities and bringing those together. How were they going to play out? Was I going to have to choose one or the other to go forward? Along the way, something else happened to me—I was a student parent. I had my son when I was a junior in college. Unlike many of my peers who were going out and doing things, I was a single parent taking care of a kid in a one-bedroom apartment, going to class. I remember eating to stay awake, those types of things. I had a professor at the time. My son was born in April, so I wasn’t done with finals yet. I had to tell most of my professors that I was pregnant and how I was going to plan to finish the semester. One professor told me, "If you're not in class, there's nothing I can do for you." So I gave birth on Sunday, and I was back in class on Thursday. Now I know more, but at the time, I was young, I didn’t have much mentorship, and I didn’t know what to do. Putting all of those things together shaped what I do now. I had basic training in stress biology in my PhD and combined it with my roots as a Chicana and my activism to look particularly at sociocultural stressors—things like racism and discrimination—and their effects on the Latinx population and pregnant women, and how those things change and program stress responsivity and biology. This has consequences for the intergenerational transmission of health disparities and mental health risk. I think finding that has really pushed my journey forward in a way that I’m not sure would have happened without all those things coming together.

Are you from Milwaukee?

03:38 - I'm not from Milwaukee; I'm from Michigan, actually. I got my PhD in Madison, but coming back was a decision after being a professor for 10 years in San Diego at Cal State San Marcos, which is in North County, San Diego. I'd been gone for about 15 years. I'm the only one in my family who really moved away, and my kids started to not be able to tell my sisters apart. That’s when I realized it was time to go home. My family now lives in Illinois, so Milwaukee got me close enough.

Zoology and Psychology? What are you working on now in terms of research?

04:12 - Interestingly, I’ve only ever taken one psychology course. I took Psych 101 my senior year as my last course. I’m not a psychology major at all, but I did behavioral neuroscience, using animal models to understand things like maternal behavior, which was the focus of my PhD. When I went to look for a job after my postdoc, I had transitioned from working with animal models because I was done with that at the time. I was trying to merge my identities throughout graduate school, but I struggled to figure out where I fit. My lab was great, but my people weren’t in my cohort. I was part of a single-parent group that was mainly women of color, and that group got me through. I still have those friends 20 years later; one of them lives five minutes from me, and we grew up together, as did our kids. That support sustained me throughout. When I moved to human studies, it felt like getting another PhD in three years. I didn’t know how to collect data from people who could actually tell me something. I wasn’t sure where I fit because I was no longer doing pure biology, but I also wasn’t trained as a developmental psychologist. Psychology departments, though, are broad, often including social, cognitive, and neuroscience areas. Behavioral work, like early primate studies on maternal neglect, has traditionally fit within psychology, biology, and physiology, so that’s how I ended up in a psychology department.

What are you working on now in terms of research?

06:02 - Currently, I’m working on several projects. One is a birth cohort study in California where we recruited about 400 women during early pregnancy and followed them until their children were six years old. We’ve been measuring discrimination, acculturative stress, mental health, and stress-related hormones like cortisol to understand how these factors influence infant emotional regulation at birth and beyond. Here in Milwaukee, I’ve become more interested in medical violence and obstetric racism during the perinatal period. We’ve partnered with community organizations like UCC and 16th Street to recruit women and reflect on their experiences with medical providers, doulas, and midwives. We’ve been examining how these experiences affect postpartum depression and cortisol levels to explore stress relationships. This work is community-based, meaning we approached the community with an idea and found partners, as opposed to community-engaged work, where you collaborate with key stakeholders to design a project equitably. In our community-engaged project, we’re working with UW-Milwaukee and St. Aldebert Church, one of the largest Spanish-speaking parishes in Milwaukee, to develop a community mental health program that could be disseminated to other institutions. These projects take a long time, and I’d say that only in the past year have these efforts started to take off. It’s all about relationships. I think about community-engaged research all the time because the community isn’t just a subject—they’re equal partners and beneficiaries of the work. It’s not about something you write up in a journal. I struggled with this for years. When I transitioned to human work, I wondered who was actually reading the research. So, we’ve been working on a mental health series to share these findings with the community. If it’s just sitting in a journal, what’s the impact it’s actually having? That’s the question I keep asking.

How has your identity informed the choices that you've made career-wise and otherwise?

09:15 - I think my identity has greatly informed what I do. Like I said, I was always trying to reconcile these two things, and I still struggle with it. Just because I’m a Chicana doesn’t mean I have to focus on that, right? I could have been a Chicana doing animal work, and that is needed too because the way questions are asked and answered is very different when there are diverse voices at the table. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed there, but for me, the satisfaction in my job and the impact I’m having comes from rolling my identity into my work, which has made it incredibly meaningful for me. I work with graduate students and undergrads, and we’re an entirely Spanish-speaking lab. We amplify the voices of students who have those lived experiences—about half of our lab is from Milwaukee, specifically the South Side. These students engage with their community, drawing on the resources and experiences they’ve had, and many have recruited participants from places they’ve lived, schools they attended, and community centers they’ve been a part of. Some students have said there’s no other space at Marquette where they can have this kind of discourse or cultural connection. Being a part of that with students who share my identity is a really powerful thing.

Where are you situated on Marquette? 

10:51 - We’re situated in Kramer for the most part, and we actually have what we call a dry lab and a wet lab. In the dry lab, we handle all of our surveys and related materials, while in the wet lab, we have the capability to process all of our own samples with centrifuges, freezers, and beakers. I have students working in both labs. My team includes students from biology, nursing