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Charlene Pope, Ph.D., MPH, CNM, BSN
Associate Professor

Medical University of South Carolina
College of Nursing
99 Jonathan Lucas Street
MSC 160
Charleston, SC 29425-1600

Telephone: (843) 792-4642
Fax: (843)-792-2104
popec@musc.edu

Dr. Charlene Pope is an Associate Professor in the College of Nursing and College of Health Professions and Associate Nurse Executive for Research at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from the University of Maryland, her Master’s in Public Health degree and Certificate in Nurse-Midwifery from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, and a doctoral degree from the University of Rochester Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, with a concentration in sociolinguistics. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Preventive Cardiology to advance her skills in epidemiology and apply sociolinguistics methodology in preventive health research. Dr. Pope also brings 20 years of clinical experience and teaching as a nurse-midwife: in urban and rural settings in the United States, in refugee camps in Cambodia and Somalia, and in consultancies and clinical experience in Mali, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh, and the Virgin Islands. Her traineeship while at Johns Hopkins included clinical experience on the Navaho Reservation. She has taught in the undergraduate program at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport Department of Nursing and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and School of Nursing graduate programs, where she was appointed International Liaison for their Sister City projects in West Africa. She welcomes students who wish to discuss public health, international maternal and child health midwifery, and women’s health care and provider-patient communication.

Dr. Pope has three areas of research interest: provider-patient communication, preventive medicine, and racial/ethnic variations and disparities in health services. In support of these interests, she received the American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in 2000, a dissertation award from the Division of Linguistics of the National Science Foundation in 2001, and a NIH National Center for Minority Health Disparities Scholar Award for racial/ethnic disparities research from 2001-2006.

Dr. Pope joined the Medical University of South Carolina in 2003. She is a member of the Research Committee. She has taught courses in the graduate and doctoral programs: Research and Evidence-Based Practice, Advanced Qualitative Research Methods, and Statistics for Health Care Research. Dr. Pope serves as a Project Coordinator with the CON Hispanic Health Initiative and Core Faculty for the MUSC Center for Health Disparities Research. Dr. Pope is Principal Investigator for the Carolinas Conversations Collection, an NLM/NIH funded Web-based archive of interviews with people over 65 years of age from diverse ethnic and linguistic groups talking about health and illness. She also participates as principal investigator and co-investigator in VA Health Service Research & Development (HSR&D) funded studies at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center.