Faculty Spotlight: Ashley White, Ph.D. - Health Services Administration

May 12, 2023

Ashley White feels at home at Xavier University. There’s a good reason for that.

White grew up in Cincinnati, not far from Xavier’s campus. She went to Walnut Hills High School, down the road from Xavier. She attended Xavier for her undergraduate degree.

“I didn’t go very far,” said White, who decided to branch out — a little — and attend the University of Cincinnati for her Master’s Degree.

Her current position at Xavier as a professor of Health Services Administration has brought White full circle.

She was pre-med as an undergrad at Xavier and graduated in 2008.

“That’s what I thought I wanted to do was to be a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon,” said White.

Through the guidance and mentorship of the people she met along the way at places like the Cincinnati Health Department and the Northern Kentucky Health Department, White discovered what she was really looking for: epidemiology.

She was in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband and decided to look for programs that offered epidemiology. White found one and soon learned that epidemiology is “the disease detective aspect of healthcare.”
White’s always had a desire to help people make better lifestyle decisions, and she wanted to be a part of the proactive side of healthcare.

In South Carolina, White got to spearhead some research that focused on the human papilloma virus, and she looked at vaccinations, and learned how to take information that seems abstract and make it concrete and actionable.
White specializes in geospatial analysis within epidemiology, which “is a fancy way of saying that I put a lot of data on a map,” White said.

After graduating with her Ph.D., White returned to Xavier two years ago.

“I didn’t ever think I’d be coming back to Cincinnati, let alone working in the Health Services Administration, but with me being an epidemiologist and doing geospatial analysis, my research focuses on healthcare access,” said White.
Part of White’s focus at Xavier is on the community aspect of medicine. She teaches quantitative methods (biostatistics) for health services, public health, intro to the U.S. healthcare system, and applied epidemiology and population health.

White teaches undergraduates and graduate students at Xavier, a dynamic she loves because both sets of students are at very different places in their education.

Students get to be a part of White’s research as well. She’s working with Healthcare Access Now, an organization that’s trying to help create confidence in the community for people to approach their clinicians and clinical teams with their healthcare questions.

“It’s been really awesome that what I started out really loving and wanting to do, but I thought would be through the eyes of a clinician or a surgeon has really turned out to be as a public health professional,” said White.

White’s classroom approach casts a wide net of information and experiential learning. From bringing in a wide range of guest speakers, to drawing on her own personal experiences at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, to leaning on fellow faculty members in the department who have an array of expertise in a number of different fields, White’s students have the ability to discover what they’re interested in and the resources to pursue it.

There’s also a pipeline of alumni that White connects to her students, so they can “see people that have graduated and what they’re doing now with the education that they received from our department,” White said. “That’s a resource here at Xavier so they can help us connect with alums or people working within specific fields because healthcare is so broad. You can do so much with it.”

White’s ability to connect with her students is an important part of her job, and she knows how powerful that piece of the job is because she experienced it as a student at Xavier.

“I get them in this classroom and if I can make a connection with them, they’re going to take a piece of this wherever they go, and it’s going to take them places that I would never imagine,” said White.

Xavier’s a service oriented place. That’s one of its Jesuit values, and White weaves that into her curriculum.
In White’s statistics class, she designed a class project in collaboration with TriHealth’s Employee Wellness Department. TriHealth needed help with data entry.

“I have a class of 17 data students that I would love for them to get some interaction with real data,” White explained. “How about we make a project out of this, where my students get education and access to real data and you get your data put in correctly by college students that are in health services. Sometimes the service opportunities end up turning into class projects like that.”

It gives White’s students a preview of what it would be like to work for a healthcare organization or hospital.
“Sometimes it’s not so academic, it’s just being a resource of information,” White said.

Because she grew up in Cincinnati and attended Xavier, White’s in a position to thrive at her alma mater. She’s able to see what’s changed since she was in college and she can still appreciate what’s stayed the same.

“One of the things I like is that Xavier is willing to grow and change where they see the need,” said White. “Being an African American woman, there were not a lot of resources for Black students... There were not a lot of support resources and [now I] see how the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has grown and the way they reach out.

“I think higher education is changing and I’m noticing this more so at Xavier where a college used to be almost a weed-out mindset, sink or swim, you’re either college-material or you’re not. Whereas now, let's allow everybody the opportunity to go to college and if you discover it’s not for you, then it’s your choice rather than 'you just didn’t make it.'”

What hasn’t changed is the close-knit community at Xavier. White’s professors knew her by name and she makes that same effort now as a professor. There’s a small student-to-teacher ratio at Xavier and White feels like that gives her the best chance to connect with her students.

Xavier’s also a place that will allow students the time and opportunities to figure out what they’d like the rest of their lives to look like.

“Xavier is a great place to help you figure that out,” said White. “We have really structured our first-year curriculum to expose you to things to help you narrow that down. Not to necessarily figure it out your first year but to help kind of guide you through it. We’re excited to help you do that.”