Center Leadership

Mary Lou Voytko, Ph.D., Director of the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE), and Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy; joint appointment in the Department of Pathology, Section on Comparative Medicine. Dr. Voytko received her Ph.D. in Anatomy from the State University of New York Health Science Center at Syracuse in New York. Following postdoctoral work at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she joined the faculty of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1993. Dr. Voytko is a neuroscientist with a research focus on determining the neurobiological basis of cognitive changes associated with advanced age and menopause. She is the Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on several NIH-funded grants and serves on advisory boards within and outside of the institution, and at government funding agencies. Dr. Voytko has been extensively involved in increasing faculty development opportunities at the WFUSM, and currently chairs the institution-wide Faculty Development Committee. She led the mentoring and leadership activities of the WHCoE since 1998. Dr. Voytko represented WFUSM at the first National Workshop on Mentoring held in Washington, DC. She has attended leadership workshops held at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC, American Association of Medical Colleges Professional Development Workshops, and was a Fellow of the 2002-2003 class in the Hedwig van Amerigen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women.
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Cheryl Bushnell, MD, MHS, Associate Director of the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE), Associate Professor, Neurology. Dr. Bushnell completed her neurology residency training, stroke research fellowship, and graduate degree in clinical research at Duke University.  After 6 years on faculty in the Duke Division of Neurology, she joined the Neurology faculty at Wake Forest University Health Sciences October 2007.  Her clinical practice is focused on inpatient and outpatient stroke treatment.  She is also a mentor for residents and stroke fellows.  Her women’s health research interests are focused on sex differences in stroke risk, stroke outcomes in women, the impact of hormone therapy and comorbidities on these outcomes, and stroke in pregnancy, including preeclampsia.  She is currently PI of a NIH K02 grant to examine sex differences in subclinical vascular disease in midlife, with a special emphasis on differences occurring with menopause.  In addition, she is PI of a substudy of the Bugher Foundation/American Heart Association Stroke Prevention Research Center grant (coordinating center at Duke University) to study specific genetic polymorphisms and cognition in African Americans with small vessel-type stroke.  Another interest is stroke prevention, as co-PI of the Adherence eValuation for Acute Ischemic stroke Longitudinal (AVAIL), a large multi-center stroke registry focused on determining the barriers to stroke prevention medication adherence at 3 months and one year after stroke.  She is also a collaborator with the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study-MRI substudy.  Dr. Bushnell’s leadership training includes the AAMC Career Development seminar for Early Career Women Faculty and is a recent graduate of the WHCoE-sponsored Career Development Seminar for Emerging Women Leaders.
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April Ronca, Ph.D., Research Program Director for the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE); Associate Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology; joint appointment, Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy. She is also a member of the Program in Neuroscience and the Graduate School training faculty. Dr. Ronca received her B.S. in Psychology and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Ohio State University as a Presidential Fellow. Her previous positions include Associate Research Scientist in the Program in Neural Science at Indiana University, and Director of the Developmental Neurobiology and Behavior Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Ronca’s research is focused on mammalian pregnancy, birth and the transition from prenatal to postnatal life with an emphasis on prenatal origins of neurodevelopmental disorders. Her studies utilize a translational approach involving prenatal and postnatal imaging of small mammals as well as neurobiological, biochemical and behavioral techniques to elucidate effects of the prenatal environment and birth complications on brain and behavioral phenotypes throughout the lifespan. Dr. Ronca has been awarded grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute for Child Health and Development, and NASA, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications. From 1994-96, Dr. Ronca was an Investigator on two space shuttle experiments, the first in which NASA launched pregnant mammals into orbit. In 2004, her developmental space biology research was featured on the Science Discovery channel. She was recently interviewed for the History Channel ‘The Universe’ series for a segment on ‘Sex in Space’ that aired in December 2008. Dr. Ronca is the 2004 recipient of the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and the Thora Halstead Young Investigator’s Award from the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology (ASGSB). She has served on numerous review panels and working groups, and presently serves on the Board of Directors for ASGSB, and the Editorial Board for ASGSB and Reproductive Biology & Endocrinology. Dr. Ronca holds memberships in the American Physiological Society, International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, Sigma Xi, Society for Gynecological Investigation, Society for Neuroscience, Society for the Study of Reproduction, and Association for Women in Science.
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Sonia J. Crandall, Ph.D., Leadership Program Director for the Women's Center of Excellence (WHCoE); Professor, Family and Community Medicine; Joint Appointment, Maya Angelou Research Center on Minority Health. Dr. Crandall has been on faculty at WFUSM since 1994.  From 1989 to 1994, she was a faculty member and Director of Faculty Development in Family Medicine at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.  Dr. Crandall received her Ph.D. in Adult and Community Education from the University of Oklahoma.  She earned a B.S. in Zoology from Western Illinois University, and Master's degrees in Education and Epidemiology from the University of Illinois and Wake Forest University School of Medicine, respectively.
For six years, Dr. Crandall served as director for the Medicine as a Profession course, a two-year preclinical course.  She has been actively involved in face-to-face teaching for the past 18 years and has a long-standing interest in medical education, faculty development, and educational research.  She has published several articles on medical student attitudes, one of which was awarded Best Paper by an Established Investigator (Division I) at the 1995 American Educational Research Association (AERA) meetings.  She was a member of the task force that prepared the handbook for reviewers of research manuscripts, which was published in the 2001 September issue of Academic Medicine.  She designed the “Accept, Revise, Reject” workshop for the Southern Group on Educational Affairs (SGEA) to assist with increasing the pool of trained reviewers for journals and educational research conferences.  She has co-authored eight funded Title VII HRSA primary care training grants and is currently Project Director/Co-Director on three grants.  Dr. Crandall is an active member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, AAMC, AERA, SGEA, the Association for Medical Education in Europe, and the European Association for Communication in Health Care.
Dr. Crandall chairs WFUSM's Cultural Competency Theme Team.  She is a Fellow of the 2005-2006 class in the Hedwig van Amerigen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women.
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Shannon Golden, MA, Project Manager of the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE); Departmental Affiliation with the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy. Ms. Golden joined the WHCoE staff in 2007 with experience in project management, data collection and management, and qualitative research design.  She has managed several community-based NIH and CDC grants involving designing and conducting qualitative interviews and focus groups, dietary assessments, and collecting survey data.  For the WHCoE, she assists in seeking funding opportunities in women's health research, preparing grant applications, and serves as both the financial manager and Research Program coordinator.  She serves as Coordinator of the Biennial Graylyn Conference on Women's Cognitive Health. 
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Diana L. Cornelison, Administrative Assistant of the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE); Departmental Affiliation with the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy. Ms. Cornelison is the Mentoring Program Coordinator, a program which facilitates junior women faculty with establishing one-on-one mentoring relationships with senior women and men faculty members.  This program also offers many training opportunitites for both mentors and mentees.  She is the Race Director for the Excellence Triathlon, an annual event that raises funds for research, education & prevention programs for Domestic Violence agencies & initiatives.  Ms. Cornelison also serves as the Co-Coordinator for the biennial Graylyn Conference on Women's Cognitive Health.  She serves as liaison for the Women's Health Service Line of WFU Baptist Medical Center, serving on their Steering, Research and Marketing committees. 
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Natalie Barrett, Administrative Secretary of the Women's Health Center of Excellence (WHCoE); Departmental Affiliation with the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy. Ms. Barrett provides support to the WHCoE Central Office and Leadership Program. She is a certified Master CIW Designer and is the Web Designer for the WHCoE and Excellence Triathlon websites. She develops the quarterly newsletter and monthly update.  Ms. Barrett serves as Co-Director of the Excellence Triathlon and leads the Volunteer Task Force for the event.
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