Three faculty have been named SMART honorees by the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham: Michele Forman, an instructor in the Department of History and program director of Media Studies; Isabel Scarinci, Ph.D., a professor in the Division of Preventive Medicine; and Bisakha Sen, Ph.D., associate professor of health care policy in the School of Public Health.
The Fund’s mission is to inspire women to use their philanthropic power to create positive social change for women and girls. The women will be honored at the Fund’s Smart Party event, a high-tech cocktail party and fundraiser benefitting The Women’s Fund.
Forman is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who served as associate producer on Spike Lee’s Academy Award-nominated film “4 Little Girls,” a feature-length documentary for HBO about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Her work at UAB has been instrumental in the creation of a student-produced archive of more than 120 community-based social justice short films.
Scarinci leads innovative research on cancer prevention and control among low-income, racial and ethnic minorities and immigrant women. She is also an active mentor of students and junior faculty, and she is co-founder of a mentoring program for undergraduate Latino students.
Sen specializes in health economics and health policies on vulnerable populations. Her research focuses on how the BP oil spill affected the health of low-income children living in Alabama’s Gulf region. She is also the founder and director of Notinee, an Indian fusion dance troupe that has dancers representing four different continents.
