Dr. Kathryn L. Braun is Professor and Chair of the DrPH Program in the Department of Public Health Sciences. She has a joint appointment with the School of Social Work, where she serves as Co-Investigator of the National Resource Center for Native Hawaiian Elders. She is affiliated with the UH Center on Aging, through which she serves as evaluator for the Hawai‘i Healthy Aging Partnership, dedicated to building capacity to deliver evidence-based health promotion programs for older adults. She also is Research Director of ‘Imi Hale -- Native Hawaiian Cancer Network, which is funded through a grant to Papa Ola Lo¯kahi (a Native Hawaiian Health organization) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In this role, she mentors Native Hawaiians who want to expand their skills in research, grant writing, and publishing. Dr. Braun’s primary teaching responsibilities are in the doctoral program, teaching seminars on health disparities and evidence-based public health. She is known for her work in community-based participatory research in cancer and gerontology, and she has published more than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics. She is a fellow in the Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. She also consults as a trainer and program evaluator in Hawai‘i. Dr. Braun is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in the Philippines (Bontoc) in the 1970s. In 2008, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Busan, Korea. She is the 2009-2011 President of the Active Aging Consortium Asia Pacific, an international network of gerontologists in Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Singapore, and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. She likes to travel and has visited all 7 continents and more than 110 countries.
Questions that face dying individuals, their families, and the professionals that help them at the end of their lifes are explored in this volume. The contributors help the reader to come to terms with issues of mortality complicated by the diversity of cultures within society.
