Lab coats and life lessons
As the last participant leaves and thanks her for today’s session, Dr. Yuliana (Yuli) Soto feels a sense of accomplishment. She exits the high school gym, excited to come back for the next session. While many scientists work in a lab, Yuli collects the data for her research at local high schools.
As an undergraduate at UIC, Yuli wanted to work with Latinos like herself. She got her opportunity when Drs. David Marquez and Eduardo Esteban Bustamante were looking for a bilingual research volunteer. Yuli helped PhD candidate Susie Aguiñaga measure how exercise improved cognition and mental health (happiness, anxiety, depression) in adults with cognitive impairment. Yuli describes her feeling after being able to collect the data from the participants at Casa Central, an organization providing support for Latinos in Chicago:
“Doing data entry versus actually going out there and talking to people, collecting the data is completely different. I fell in love with it. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
While Yuli finished her Bachelor’s in kinesiology, Susie opened the Health Equity and Aging Lab (HEAL) at the University of Urbana-Champaign and offered Yuli a job. With Alzheimer’s Disease being estimated to increase exponentially in the Latino population, finding ways to delay cognitive decline in this population was a big focus of the lab. There, Yuli investigated the impact of exercise on cognition and mental health in adults from day centers across Chicago. Yuli knew it was important to first build trust with the community, so it was common to see her help with anything needed, including moving furniture.
“It's hard to get in, especially with underserved individuals. There is this lack of trust with the research community.”
The more Yuli visited, the more the community started warming up to her and they realized she had good intentions. Learn more about the benefits of exercise in adult day centers and the barriers to providing this service in Yuli’s recent paper.
Yuli chose to complete her master’s in the HEAL lab where she focused on how well adult Latinos adhered to the MIND diet, which is beneficial for slowing down cognitive decline. Food is a big part of the Latino culture so putting restrictions on their meals strips away their sense of community. Instead of completely cutting out certain foods, this diet focuses on incorporating more beneficial foods like leafy greens and whole grains and eating less fried foods, red meat, and sweets, making it an ideal option for the Latino community. However, Yuli found that most of the people in the study had low adherence to the diet.
Committed to improving these results, the HEAL lab thought of a creative solution. Yuli helped gather a new group of adult Latinos and invited dance instructors to teach them Salsa, Bachata, and Merengue. After 4 months, the participants who took part in the dance classes had better adherence to the MIND diet than those who didn’t. This is a promising start and, in the future, Yuli wants to further increase adherence to the diet by making instructions available in Spanish and create recipes of traditional Latino dishes that adhere to the MIND diet.
Yuli was so invested in the lab’s research that she chose to pursue a PhD there. When developing her thesis project, she remembered her struggles with her mental health during college and how she overcame them by turning to yoga and religion. This sparked an idea — if yoga could help her, it could help others too. She wanted to work with Latina adolescents (age 14 and up), a population prone to psychological distress and who often experience barriers to mental health treatment.
“(Latina youth) are raised by parents with Mexican values and then they go to school where American values are pushed. They may feel that they don’t belong in either world.”
Since physical activity has many benefits to improve quality of life, she developed the RESPIRA+ program that teaches adolescent Latinas yoga, coping strategies, and conflict resolution. Yuli planned to recruit participants at church, like her other projects, but while conducting her background research, she learned that many churches did not embrace yoga because of its spiritual roots in Buddhism and Hinduism. Yuli overcame this challenge by not mentioning any deities and instead focusing on general sayings such as “I deserve love, I deserve peace.” While the yoga classes were taught by a Latina instructor, Yuli led discussions about coping strategies and conflict resolution herself and all programming was offered in both English and Spanish. The bilingual nature of the program had an unintended, but favorable outcome:
“The students who spoke English were trying to speak Spanish and those who spoke Spanish were trying to speak English. It was a learning experience for them that they really enjoyed."
After graduating with her PhD, she accepted a postdoc position at UIC. Which lab did she join? That very same one where she volunteered all those years ago as an undergrad. As the recipient of the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s Bridging the Gap Research Award, she will receive $8,000 to continue work on her RESPIRA+ program. During her PhD, Yuli’s lab covered the cost of a yoga mat, yoga blocks, workbook, and Fitbit for each participant, which totaled $300 per person. Receiving the Research Award will allow Yuli to share her program with more youth in need. She also wants to use some of the funds to measure brain activity before and after RESPIRA+ to see if the program leads to beneficial changes in brain activity. Additionally, she wants to build a website and eventually an app so participants can track their progress and do the exercises from anywhere.
Yuli admits that recruiting for Latina adolescents has been a challenge. The community is tight knit and will not easily admit outsiders unless they know they can trust you. If you know a high school principal or superintendent who could benefit from implementing the RESPIRA+ program, reach out to Yuli.
While RESPIRA+ is only open to Latina adolescents right now, Yuli envisions a future where all adolescents across the country participate in the program, but it will take time to make it culturally relevant to a broader population. With no plans for stopping her program anytime soon, Yuli will be spending a lot more time in high school gyms giving Latina adolescents resources for self-improvement.