Heather McCauley ’06 attributes her career path to her St. Lawrence education. McCauley is a co-author of a newly published study examining how partner violence affects women's reproductive health. The study, titled "Pregnancy coercion, intimate partner violence and unintended pregnancy," was published in the January issue of the journal Contraception.

 The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California Davis School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health. McCauley is research project coordinator for the Violence against Women Prevention Research Program at Harvard School of Public Health. She earned a Master of Science in Global Health at Harvard in 2008, and has been accepted into its Doctor of Science in Social Epidemiology program, planning to concentrate in the social determinants of health.

McCauley majored in sociology and minored in European studies at St. Lawrence. Her interest in preventing gender-based violence and her desire to pursue this interest as a profession stemmed from her major. She says sociology gave her the language and the research tools needed to understand how violence occurs within discourses of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class.

As an SLU student, McCauley was a member of Kappa Delta Sigma sorority.  She studied on the University’s Denmark Program and also participated in a summer course in Thailand to understand the spread of HIV/AIDS in Southeast Asia. This experience impressed researchers working in the region and has allowed her to work there professionally. She currently manages studies in both Thailand and Cambodia. Hoping for a career as a professor at a liberal arts institution, she attributes the opportunities she has had since graduation to her experience working one-on-one with St. Lawrence faculty to develop her talents, and would like to provide the same opportunity for others.