Kodiak Soled

Kodiak Soled, MPhil, MSN, RN, is the proud recipient of the Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing Alumni Association, Inc./J. Margaret Ada Mutch Scholarship. She is currently a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the Columbia University School of Nursing and a National Institutes of Health Ruth Kirschstein Predoctoral Research Fellow.

Kodiak earned her Bachelor of Arts in International and Intercultural Studies at Pitzer College and her Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) from Johns Hopkins University, where she graduated summa cum laude and with the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumni Award. Before nursing, Kodiak was trained as a therapeutic chef to support the health and wellbeing of people with chronic illnesses. During this time, she founded an LGBTQ perinatal support group. She realized the lack of social support and scientific knowledge about how to prepare this population for parenthood and support their needs. This experience inspired her to attend nursing school to acquire the knowledge and skills to provide care to this population. During her MSN, Kodiak worked under the direction of Tonia Poteat, Ph.D., to qualitatively explore provider’s knowledge gaps of transgender health. She realized the impact and need for more research in this area, and pivoted from a clinical to a research career. She currently works with Walter Bockting, Ph.D., and his lab through the Program for the Study of LGBT Health, to understand family building desires and fertility preservation utilization among transmasculine and nonbinary adults.

Kodiak has supported and led numerous community efforts related to health equity. While at Hopkins, she served as on the governing board of SOURCE, a community engagement and service-learning center, and the executive board for Out for Business. The latter earned the 2018 Diversity Recognition Award for outstanding contributions and demonstrable efforts in advancing diversity and inclusion at Johns Hopkins University. She currently serves on the executive board of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality as the Health Professionals in Training Co-Chair, the Education Committee Co-Chair, and the interim chair for the Board Development Committee. She has led several initiatives through these various roles to expand diversity in the organization. Among other awards, she has been named a Jonas-Blaustein Scholar and a Columbia University School of Nursing Diversity Fellow.

Kodiak’s community-informed research explores multidimensional social support among sexual and gender minority (SGM) childbearing parents throughout the perinatal period. She is particularly interested in the unique ways SGM childbearing individuals are resilient during an intensified period of hetero-and cis-normativity and its impact on perinatal and infant outcomes. She hopes to generate foundational knowledge through this study to develop and test future culturally-competent, community-based social support interventions that promote perinatal health and wellbeing among SGM families. This study is generously supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research, AWHONN Every Woman, Every Baby Award, and the Hill-Rom Celeste Phillips Family-Centered Maternity Care Award. It will lay the foundation for Kodiak’s future independent program of research focused on reducing perinatal health disparities among this underrepresented and vulnerable population of childbearing parents.