Cali Salafia is a Ph.D. candidate in HDFS who plans to defend her dissertation and graduate in Spring 2025. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in philosophy from the University at Albany (SUNY) in 2017 and obtained a master’s degree in health psychology from Central Connecticut State University in 2020.
Cali has worked with her advisor and mentor, Dr. Keith Bellizzi, throughout the program on an NIH-funded longitudinal study examining resilience trajectories among over 550 individuals newly diagnosed with breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer. She was fortunate to engage in nearly every aspect of this project, from participant recruitment to presentations and publications. During her doctoral training, Cali developed research interests focused on medical decision-making and family communication regarding cancer risk and treatment. Her dissertation focuses on examining the sources of health information that women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer utilized to inform their surgical decision-making. She carried out an online survey of more than 200 women, asking them to report the sources they used, how these sources influenced their surgical treatment decisions, and their level of decisional regret regarding their surgical treatment. Cali has just accepted a T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Psycho-Oncology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, set to begin at the end of Summer 2025. She looks forward to moving to New York City and gaining additional training to pursue an academic research career.
Outside of work, Cali enjoys coffee shops, hiking in New Hampshire, reading fiction, hot yoga, and spending time with her loved ones.