Topic: The Forgotten Group: How the Middle Class is Dealing with Katrina Trauma

Listen to first hand accounts of the catastrophe from my friends Kera and Derek. Hear the amazing story of how I finally found out that they were alive!

Guests: Kera Moseley, Ph.D. & Derek Pociask, Ph.D.

Dr. Kera Moseley currently serves as the President/CEO of Moseley Research Consulting Inc., a female minority owned and operated consulting firm located in New Orleans, Louisiana. Established in 1995, MRC Inc. provides a full array of nonprofit technical assistance services to public and governmental health and social service nonprofit agencies. She holds a Masters and Doctoral degree from Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and has over 20 years of public health experience locally, nationally and internationally. She served for three years as a US Peace Corps Health Volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa, working with several governmental and community nonprofits, as well as WHO/GPA and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health in establishing the first comprehensive HIV/AIDS program for the country in 1990. Her work was selected and named as a “Top 10 Congressional Highlight” and presented to the United States Congress in 1991. In 1993, she organized the first global conference to address HIV/AIDS in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. She has served as lead research investigator on over two-dozen original research and evaluation projects on public health topics ranging from infectious and chronic diseases to substance use and mental health. Several of her studies and evaluations have focused on high-risk behaviors and hard to reach populations. She has been lead author on over two-dozen original publications and reports, and has presented her work at several conferences locally, nationally and internationally.

Dr. Derek Pociask has lived in Louisiana for most of his life, having relocated with his family over 25-years ago to Baton Rouge. He worked for the City of Baton Rouge as a Biologist in the Department of Mosquito and Rodent Control. Deciding to further his education, he moved to New Orleans in 1993 to pursue a Ph.D. in Pathology at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. His doctoral research studied free radicals in heart disease. Upon graduation in 1999, he received a postdoctoral position at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in the Department of Pathology where he studies the development of fibrosis and its progression in lung disease. In 2003, he was awarded a National Institute of Health (NIH) training fellowship. He has over 10 publications in peer review journal articles and has presented posters and presentations at local and national conferences over a dozen times.