Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy, Management & Behavior

Email: mgallant@albany.edu
Phone: (518)402-0333
Office: School of Public Health
East Campus, One University Place, Rm 155

Curriculum Vitae | Publications | Grant Activity | Personal Website

Recent Scientific Accomplishments

Dr. Gallant has focused her recent work on psychosocial influences on the self-care behaviors of older adults and adults with chronic illness. With the goal of health promotion, Gallant is concerned with translating evidence-based research into effective public health practice at the community level. One area of her work examines how family relationships and social-network interactions influence chronic illness self-management among older adults. Based on pilot research, supported by a grant from NIA (with CSDA associate Glenna Spitze), that explored the influence of family and friends on older adults' management of chronic illnesses, Gallant has a manuscript under revision at Research on Aging that identifies specific ways in which social-network members, in particular family and friends, positively and negatively influence older adults' chronic-illness self-management behavior. Gallant also co-authored (with Spitze) an article in Research on Aging that focuses on the strategies that older adults with chronic illness develop for handling ambivalence in relations with their adult children. A second area of her work examines how factors at different ecological levels (social, community, environmental) influence health behaviors and self-care behaviors. Recent work in this area includes a co-authored article in the Journal of Community Health that examines sources of support for diabetes self-care in urban and rural underserved communities and documents the relationship between these sources of support and diabetes self-care behaviors.

Funded Research

Gallant is the Co-PI of the Core Research Project of the School of Public Health's Prevention Research Center (and was the PI for the previous Core Project). This project involves implementing community-based walking programs in rural communities in upstate NY. Gallant is currently collaborating with Senior Services of Albany on a grant funded by the Administration on Aging as part of a national effort to implement and disseminate evidence-based health promotion programs for older adults. This project, one of 13 demonstration sites, involves the community-based implementation of a heart disease self-management program for older women. Gallant was funded (with Glenna Spitze) through Albany's Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities to complete a pilot study, which developed a critical literature review on cultural and social-network factors in minority populations that affect chronic-illness self-care.

Future Plans

Gallant (with CSDA associate Spitze) plans to submit an R01 research grant application to NIA in February 2007 that will build on their NIA-funded pilot research project and on their work as part of the Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities. This planned project will examine the social context of chronic-illness self-management by collecting longitudinal data on social-network influences in three ethnic groups. This data collection will lay the foundation for the development of a self-management intervention for older adults with chronic illness.