Marlaine Figueroa Gray, PhD

Biography

Marlaine Figueroa Gray, PhD, is a medical anthropologist with a passion for eliciting illness narratives and health care experiences from patients, family members, and medical professionals. She has researched how the intersection of creative practices and medical care provide insight into understanding the logic of biomedical care, what counts as evidence that a creative activity "works," and how arts activities can serve as a model of how to provide better, more patient- and family-centered care. She is particularly interested in how we attend to patient suffering, and in what types of care are possible when no medical treatments are available.

Her previous work includes examining education policy in sub-Saharan Africa and developing curricula for health education, specifically HIV/AIDS education in Kenya and Mozambique.

Dr. Figueroa Gray has extensive experience designing qualitative studies and analyzing qualitative data. At Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI), she uses this expertise to examine how patients, family members, and physicians make medical decisions when outcomes are uncertain and stakes are high, such as deciding whether or not to participate in an immunotherapy trial, or choosing which treatments to pursue as an adolescent or young adult with advanced cancer. She founded the KPWHRI Qualitative Research Interest Group, which supports outstanding qualitative research at the institute.

RESEARCH INTERESTS AND EXPERIENCE

Child & Adolescent Health
Social Determinants of Health
Complementary & Integrative Health
Implementation of alternative healing programs in U.S. hospitals; patient and provider experience of alternative healing programs
Medical Education
Use of the arts in medical education; history of medical education; medical school curriculum development
Cancer Care and End of Life Care
Oncology support and care; end of life decision making
Integrative Medicine and Arts in Healing Programs
Participant experience; benefits; values and funding; legacy projects
Patient-Centered Care

Shared decision making; care logics
Global Health
HIV/AIDS education; maternal and child health; sub-Saharan Africa

Recent publications

Figueroa Gray MS, Shapiro L, Dorsey CN, Randall S, Casperson M, Chawla N, Zebrack B, Fujii MM, Hahn EE, Keegan THM, Kirchhoff AC, Kushi LH, Nichols HB, Wernli KJ, Sauder CAM, Chubak J. A patient-centered conceptual model of AYA cancer survivorship care informed by a qualitative interview study. Cancers. 2024 Sep 4;16(17):3073. doi: 10.3390/cancers16173073. PubMed

Wernli KJ, Haupt EC, Chawla N, Osuji T, Shen E, Smitherman AB, Casperson M, Kirchhoff AC, Zebrack BJ, Keegan THM, Kushi L, Baggett C, Kaddas HK, Ruddy KJ, Sauder CAM, Wun T, Figueroa Gray M, Chubak J, Nichols H, Hahn EE. Emergency department use in adolescent and young adult cancer early survivors from 2006 to 2020. J Adolesc Young Adult Oncol. 2024 Apr 29. doi: 10.1089/jayao.2023.0174 [Epub ahead of print] PubMed

Figueroa Gray M, Randall S, Banegas M, Ryan GW, Henrikson NB. Personal legacy and treatment choices for serious illness: A scoping review. BMJ Support Palliat Care. 2024 Jan 24:spcare-2023-004439. doi: 10.1136/spcare-2023-004439. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Shapiro LN, Gray MF, Freitag C, Taneja P, Kariya H, Crane PK, O'Hare AM, Vig EK, Taylor JS. Expanding the ethnographic toolkit: Using medical documents to include kinless older adults living with dementia in qualitative research. J Aging Stud. 2023 Jun;65:101140. doi: 10.1016/j.jaging.2023.101140. Epub 2023 May 10. PubMed

Nichols H, Wernli KJ, Chawla N, O’Meara ES, Figueroa Gray M, Green LE, Baggett CD, Casperson M, Chao C, Jones SM, Kirchhoff AC, Kuo T, Lee C , Malogolowkin M, Quesenberry CP, Ruddy KJ, Wun T, Zebrack B, Chubak J, Hahn EE, Keegan TH, Kushi LH. Challenges and opportunities of epidemiological studies to reduce the burden of cancers in young adults. Curr Epidemiol Rep. 2023 Sep;10(3):115-124. doi: 10.1007/s40471-022-00286-9. Epub 2022 Mar 29. PubMed