Sara F. Jacoby, MPH, MSN, PhD

Assistant Professor of Nursing

Assistant Professor of Nursing in Surgery

Dr. Jacoby combines nursing and public health in her approach to injury science and urban health research. As a nurse in a Philadelphia ICU, Dr. Jacoby was witness to the profound trauma and violence that impacted the lives of hospitalized patients and their families. This inspires her scholarship on the experience of injured people and the socio-structural etiologies of racial and ethnic disparities in trauma, violence, and opportunities for health.

Cities are dynamic places that can promote health and at the same time be the foundation for profound health inequalities. My research focuses on how injury risks and outcomes intersect with the social and structural conditions of urban environments.

Education

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2015
MSN, University of Pennsylvania, 2008
BSN, University of Pennsylvania, 2005
MPH, Columbia University, 2002
BA, Rutgers University, 1998

Social Justice

Achieving social justice requires that we acknowledge and respond to our collective and often discriminatory histories and practices in healthcare and public health. Dr. Jacoby’s research on injury and urban health focuses on the structural and social origins of the disparities we see every day and across the country in violence victimization, as well profound inequities in how opportunities for injury recovery, restoration, and health are constructed in American cities and healthcare systems.

Teaching

Dr. Jacoby currently teaches Sociocultural Influences on Health and Nursing Inquiry. She lectures across the curriculum on injury science, the structural determinants of injury and violence, and the application of mixed methods, critical theory, and social epidemiology in nursing research and practice.

Research

A Senior Scholar at the Penn Injury Science Center, Dr. Jacoby’s research is focused on identifying why injuries occur where they do in urban spaces, the experiences of injured people as they recover in their homes and communities, and how we might support health systems and urban environments to enhance safety and improve injury outcomes. Her current research focuses on identifying the potential of mobile technology to better elicit patient-reported long-term outcomes after trauma in effort to identify pathways for a stronger continuum of health and social care after hospitalization. Dr. Jacoby’s research is also focused on the social and health consequences of intersections between emergency medical interventions and law enforcement activities in response to violence.

Clinical Practice

Dr. Jacoby is a Registered Nurse and completed an MSN as an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner with a background in trauma and surgical intensive care nursing.

Selected Career Highlights

2019, Early Career Reviewer, Center for Scientific Review, National Institutes of Health
2019, Rising Star Research Award, Eastern Nursing Research Society
2017, Senior Fellow, Leonard David Institute for Health Economics
2017, Senior Fellow, Center for Public Health Initiatives
2015, Fellow, CDC Foundation, Penn Injury Science Center
2015, Henry O. Thompson Prize in Ethics

Selected Publications

Jacoby, S.F., Robinson, A., Webster, J.R., Morrison, C.M., & Richmond, T.S. (in press). The feasibility and acceptability of mobile health monitoring for real-time assessment of traumatic injury outcomes, mHealth.
Aronowitz, S., Richmond, T.S., Compton, P.A., & Jacoby, S.F. (in press). Is it “true” pain? Pain treatment discharge planning for seriously injured patients. Ethnicity & Disease. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.31.1.139.
Jacoby, S.F. Branas, C.C., Holena, D.N., & Kaufman, E.J. (in press). The broader consequences of prehospital transport by police for penetrating trauma. Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery Open.
Jacoby, S.F., Rich, J., Webster, J., & Richmond, T.S. (2020). “Sharing things with people that I don’t even know”: Help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia. Ethnicity & Health, 25:6, 777-795.
Beard, J., Jacoby, S.F., James, R., Dong, B., Seamon, M., Maher, Z., Goldberg, A. & Morrison, C. (2019) Examining mass shootings from a neighborhood perspective: An analysis of multiple-causalty events and media reporting in Philadelphia, United States. Preventative Medicine, 129:105856.
Jacoby, S.F., Reeping, P. & Branas, C.C. (2020). Police-to-Hospital Transport for Violently Injured Individuals: A Way to Save Lives?. The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, 687(1): 186-201.
Jacoby, S.F., Dong, B., Beard, J.H., Wiebe, D.J., & Morrison, C.N. (2018). The enduring impact of historical and structural racism on urban violence in Philadelphia.Social Science and Medicine. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.05.038.
Jacoby, S.F., Richmond, T.S., Holena, D.N., & Kaufman, E.J. (2018). A safe haven for the injured? Urban trauma care at the intersection of healthcare, law enforcement, and race. Social Science and Medicine, 199: 115-122.
Jacoby, S F. (2017). The insight and challenge of reflexive practice in an ethnographic study of black traumatically injured patients in Philadelphia. Nursing Inquiry, 24(3).
Jacoby, S. F., Tach, L., Wiebe, D., Guerra, T., & Richmond, T. (2017). The health status and well-being of low-resource, housing-unstable, single-parent families living in violent neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Health and Social Care in the Community, 25(2): 578-589.