The WGSS Department is delighted to introduce Marcela Muricy as the 2023 winner of the Terry Alexander Award.
This award is given in honor of Terry Alexander, the mother of Courtney Alexander, a Women’s Studies major who graduated from Stony Brook in 2006. Terry Alexander worked in the New York City public schools, she was an active member of the Brownsville Community Baptist Church, and she was a community activist with the Bed Stuy Park Lions Club in Brooklyn. Terry was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1982 and, from that point forward, she and her family were regular participants in the annual MS walk to raise awareness about the disease and money to further the research. Terry attended the WGSS graduation in May 2016 to watch her daughter graduate. Sadly, shortly thereafter, she became very ill from MS-related complications and died on December 7, 2006.
The WGSS Department is grateful for the Alexander family’s continued support, and we are honored to give the Terry Alexander Award each year to students planning to pursue a career in health care or health advocacy. Our hope is that this award will generate interest among our students in examining the complexities of caring for people with chronic illnesses while also providing us with the chance to acknowledge the importance of a parent’s love, encouragement, and commitment to education and community work. Terry Alexander is a shining example of all these things.
Professor Liz Montegary presented Marcela Muricy with the award at our spring commencement ceremony.
The department unanimously selected Marcela for this award in recognition of her unwavering commitment to advancing gender, racial, and economic justice in the field of medicine. Marcela is graduating today with a perfect 4.0 GPA, a double major in WGSS and Biology, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for research. She recently won the Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence in recognition of her academic achievements and wide-ranging research experience. Marcela was also named one of the inaugural Frances Velay Fellows – this is a program designed to champion women in science here at Stony Brook – which supported her research as part of her mentor’s biochemistry lab; and she also received a Guiliano Global Fellowship to fund her community-engaged research on health disparities in Brazil and on the needs of patients at under-resourced hospitals in Rio de Janeiro.
As an innovative feminist thinker, Marcela’s approach to health research and advocacy spans multiple fields and multiple scales, ranging from the biochemical to the sociocultural. Take, for example, her WGSS senior research project (which she completed during her junior year!) on the social and economic impact of anxiety on pregnant bodies and their fetuses. Adverse mental and physical health outcomes, Marcela explains, can be transmitted at the cellular level across generations in ways that leave individuals susceptible to further economic insecurity. Consequently, she argues, addressing perinatal anxiety within poor and working-class communities of color can be a way of interrupting these trends. Her highly original and urgently needed project analyzed the strengths and weakness of existing efforts to address anxiety in expecting parents and offered recommendations for developing more effective resources for pregnant people from marginalized communities.
Eager to continue working on this issue, Marcela secured a clinical research position at the Perinatal Pathways Lab at Columbia Medical Center. She will continue in this position for the next year as she broadens her familiarity with the psychobiology of pregnancy and prepares for a career in psychiatry with a focus on perinatal mental health. Thanks, Marcela, for being a fierce advocate for racial, economic, and reproductive justice!