Faculty Director Paula M. L. Moya Awarded RISE Grant to Promote Better Health Among Indigenous Peoples

Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity Center (RISE) at the University of Michigan has awarded CCSRE Faculty Director Paula M. L. Moya's grant proposal entitled, “Using Story-Power to Promote Better Health Among Indigenous Peoples.”

The project is an outgrowth of the Perfecto Project, for which Moya is the principal humanities investigator. The Perfecto Project emerges from the WhoIsZuki? fitness app being developed by James Landay (Computer Science and HAI) and Elizabeth Murnane (Engineering at Dartmouth) that employs story-telling to encourage users to stay active over time. For the Perfecto Project, Moya has partnered with Landay and Murnane and with the HARTS Lab at Stanford Medicine to develop a smart-phone app targeted toward Latinx populations. Funded primarily by the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility Project, both the Perfecto Project and this new narrative geared toward indigenous communities will employ groundbreaking cross-disciplinary collaborations between engineering, medicine, and the humanities.

"I am so excited to have received a stamp of approval for this effort from the RISE Center at the University of Michigan," said Moya. "I look forward to getting started on this new narrative!”