Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Beese Research Washington State University

Rural Health Promotion

Shawna Beese, PhD RN                                                                                                                                                       

Welcome!

After a fulfilling 12-year career in hospital management and 20 years as a nurse leader, I returned to graduate school in 2019 to work towards a PhD in Nursing focusing on population health. I wanted to transition my work to community-based health promotion. My dissertation focused on neighborhoods, not only as a site of health care delivery but also as a source of protective and risk determinants of health.

Currently, I serve as an assistant professor of rural health promotion for the Washington State University Extension through the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences. In my faculty role, my research program has three broad categories:

  • Research regarding neighborhood determinants of health and rurality: Rural disparities of health outcomes; neighborhood development; neighborhood characteristics associated with reductions of stress and the consequent biological responses; and rural identity.
  • Resource needs assessments for rural residents and project development: FarmStress; AgrAbility; chronic pain resources; and QPR suicide prevention.
  • Research toward the development of my emerging Rural Neighborhoods program: Capacity building of neighborhood/community resilience; community outreach and engagement that will enable future community-based participatory research; and co-founding the WSU Extension Rural Health Community of Practice (CoP) to launch 2024.

Program Annual Reports