Brianna Singleton

Brianna Singleton is the 2018 recipient of the M. Elizabeth Carnegie African American Scholarship. She is currently enrolled at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a second-year student in the nursing PhD doctoral program. Her research focus is to understand how occupational and personal stressors influence the cognitive perceptions of occupational burnout among transit workers. Furthermore, she is analyzing the correlations of cognitive perceptions of burnout to the manifestation of physical symptoms.

She graduated from the University of California, Riverside with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. She joined the inaugural cohort of the Master of Public Health program at the University of San Francisco (USF) where she was first introduced to the occupational and environmental health field. She graduated with honors and continued her education to become an Adult-Geriatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, with an emphasis in occupational and environmental health at UCSF.

Ms. Singleton is actively involved within her school community and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She was the first Vice President of Administrative Affairs of the Graduate Student Senate during her time at USF. During nursing school, she co-founded the Nursing Students of Color on campus as a UCSF registered campus student organization, is one of the leaders of the interdisciplinary organization on the UCSF campus called Black Student Health Alliance, is a graduate student representative on the UCSF School of Nursing DIVersity in Action (DIVA) Committee, and has been volunteering her time as a health educator to incarcerated women at the City and County of San Francisco Jail for the past 4 years. She is politically active with Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments; she speaks with California representatives to ask them to support aggressive legislation that puts a moratorium on the extraction of natural gas, also known as hydraulic fracturing. She is also a member of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.

Ms. Singleton is currently the Continuity Care Clinician at St. James Infirmary in San Francisco, California. St. James Infirmary is a peer-based occupational health and safety clinic located in San Francisco, CA, offering free, compassionate, and non-judgmental healthcare and social services for former and current sex industry workers.

Her professional goal is to address health disparities, that are caused by or exacerbated by employment conditions, and understand the systems that intensify the consequences of occupational hazards as it relates to worker productivity, well-being and safety among shift workers, low-wage workers and contingent workers. The elements of social justice that are intricately intertwined with the ability to directly affect a person’s working conditions- thus, indirectly impacting their health and livelihood- drew Ms. Singleton into occupational and environmental health nursing. Ms. Singleton will advance nursing science through implementing nurse created and directed innovative solutions to empower the most vulnerable workers.