But with part of $2.5 million in federal funding, Zeoli will devote the next three years to find out what happens to women that are mandated by the court to remain in contact with their abusers because of custody and visitation privileges for the children the pair share.

“When you have children together — leaving is not that simple,” said Zeoli, an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice.

A diverse team of MSU researchers will devote nearly all their time to women’s health studies after receiving the funding from the National Institutes of Health under the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health program.

Four professors in departments, ranging from geography to social work to nursing, are participating in the research, with each devoting 75 percent of their time to their studies.

Mary Nettleman, chair of the Department of Medicine, said the grant will provide opportunities for junior faculty to develop their research careers in women’s health. MSU is now one of at least a dozen sites funded under the program, she said.

“Many faculty are finding it difficult to balance all the demands of teaching and their academic and service duties with separate time to do significant research,” Nettleman said.

“This grant is designed to give them that protected time.”

For Zeoli, the protected time will allow her to jump from teaching two classes per semester to one class a year — an opportunity to work much faster on her research. She already has completed a small pilot study of 19 women formerly in abusive relationships, and she hopes to expand that amount by at least five times and examine multiple counties in Michigan with the funding.

Since many women have to stay in contact with their former abusers until their children are 18, she has found that a significant amount often still are abused on a psychological level instead of a physical one, she said.

“If you talk to women, many say they don’t care what happens to them — they just don’t want their kids to be affected,” Zeoli said.

Nettleman said the National Institutes of Health began funding women’s health research in the 1990s, when it came to grips that nearly all the studies it was funding were focused on men.

At MSU, more than 100 senior researchers are studying women’s health issues in some capacity, she said.

“It really is an enormous effort that goes on here,” Nettleman said.

Costellia Talley, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing, will be focusing her part of the project on examining issues important to black breast cancer survivors 50 years and older.

She hopes to use her findings to develop strategies to improve their quality of life, she said.

Sue Grady, an assistant professor in geography, also will focus her research on health care services but will be looking at mothers with pregnancy-related medical conditions to see if they are being referred to the appropriate level of hospital care, she said.

Since many researchers currently study women’s health from a standard medical aspect,
having professors from so many departments across campus will benefit women’s health in a
variety of ways, Zeoli said.

“We’re all just approaching it from a lot of different ways that are not stereotypic,” she said.
“We’re thinking outside of the box and hopefully that will give us many more insights into various aspects that affect a woman’s health.”