Nicole McConico, holds a PhD from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a JD from North Carolina Central University School of Law, and an MEd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has extensive experience in the work of social justice and has served as a federal and local subject matter expert in child abuse, child abuse prevention, and violence prevention and intervention. She was most recently an instructor at Johns Hopkins, where she created the curriculum, syllabus, and lectures for “Race as a Risk Factor: Exploring the Relationship between ‘Black’ and ‘Risk’ in Public Health Research and Practice.” Her current research includes an article in BMC Global and Public Health Journal, and challenges existing conceptualizations and operationalizations of hope within health research.