Dr. Gina Weisblat is a faculty member in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and the Director of Education for Service (Dean’s Office) at Northeast Ohio Medical University. She is a National Kresge Scholar, winning this distinction with her Asset-Based Paradigm model, and a National Scholar for Innovation and Academic Excellence for the Sullivan Alliance. Her research interests include health citizenship, public health policy, social health disparities, and advancing the talents and skills of underrepresented and underprivileged populations. She is the PI and Co-PI for multiple grants related to community health, community engagement, community development, and health citizenship.

She is the principal investigator of two major state initiatives including a large state Community Health Worker (CHW) MedTaPP grant, that focuses on building a CHW curriculum interdisciplinary practice model, and a foundational platform for the integration of CHWs in Ohio, as well as an AmeriCorps grant, contributing a 40-person health citizenship and education corps, helping youth to become navigators of their own educational and health success, with an emphasis on public health and social health disparities, while advancing the talents and skills of underrepresented and underprivileged populations. She is the co-creator and developer of the Health Professions Affinity Community (HPAC) program, and co-principal investigator. Nationally, she is the Co-investigator on a HRSA HCOP grant, exploring health disparities from the lens of the community, and on an NIH (NIMH) Urban Serving Universities award; a grant for building an urban primary care curriculum design and evaluation, with the goal of supporting an educational pathway from the Baccalaureate level at Cleveland State University, to and though the Medical Degree.

Her teaching includes: Co-course Director at NEOMED, of the Interprofessional Community Health Education class, Graduate Quantitative Statistics, and Graduate Cultural Humility. Selected, related publications include: Starting Early: Teaching Graduate Students Transferable Skills Beyond the Discipline, Journal of Research Administration (International Best Conference Paper); Building and Maintaining Collaborative Communities: Schools, University, and Community Organizations; Chapter title, “Partnerships that Transform Communities Involving Higher Education and K-12, Utilizing the Asset-Based Paradigm,” and Through the Lens of the Students: Using Narrative Inquiry to Evaluate an Innovative Urban High School, Journal of Urban Education.

Her Masters is in Counseling and Human Services from John Carroll University, and her Doctorate is from the Urban College at Cleveland State University in Housing and Economics.