Dr. Amy Bonomi on her Journey in Health Professions
NAU’s College of Health and Human Services recently welcomed Dr. Amy Bonomi as its Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives. Her path through health professions began as a child growing up in a household where both parents worked in the medical field. Her father is a noted oncologist specializing in lung cancer, and her mother dedicated her life to others as a nurse and through art. These two important figures would mark the beginning of her journey through the world of health.
Inspired by her parents’ dedication to healthcare, Amy pursued a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Loyola University (Chicago) and went on to obtain her master’s in public health from the University of Washington (Seattle). After graduating from Loyola, she worked in a hospital cancer unit where she began to focus on disease prevention and the structural barriers that get in the way of preventive care. She helped facilitate a healthcare study with her mentor, David Cella, and through interviewing hundreds of cancer patients, she learned about the impact this disease has on the lives of patients and their families. This critical quality of life tool developed for cancer patients has been cited many thousands of times and has proved to have a profound impact on how cancer patients and their families are cared for. Committed to helping address quality of life challenges, Dr. Bonomi then applied her skills to develop the US version of the World Health Organization’s quality of life assessment tool with mentor Donald Patrick at the University of Washington.
Dr. Bonomi never lost sight, however, of her desire to make an even broader difference in prevention and later pivoted her focus to the structural barriers to healthcare, such as poverty, racism, and access to education. While working on her doctorate in Health Services from the University of Washington (Seattle), she took classes that emphasized these elements of healthcare and soon found her focus on the unique issues faced by women who were the victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Dr. Bonomi’s work in domestic violence has achieved international acclaim. As part of her research in the space of domestic violence, Dr. Bonomi and her team of graduate students (at Ohio State University) listened to recorded calls between incarcerated domestic abusers and their victims from jail and documented the ways abusers tampered with and manipulated their victims to recant their stories. Recanting their stories means taking back the stories they told police, courts, domestic violence advocates, and friends and family. From this research, Dr. Bonomi’s team developed the field’s five-stage model that is cited and used globally to train professionals in the dynamics of recantation. The five-stage model includes abusers’ use of sympathy appeals – that is, calling attention to their own suffering from mental health issues, intolerable jail conditions, life without the victim – in an attempt to reverse the roles in the couple’s relationship, with the abuser becoming the “victim.” This form of manipulation would often lead the victim to express care and concern for the abuser and to agree to recant her story.
In addition, Dr. Bonomi conducted research involving interviews with college students who had experienced sexual violence and worked to identify the impacts on victims. One of her accomplishments in this field was her application (with graduate students at Ohio State University) of national definitions of sexual violence and domestic abuse to the book Fifty Shades of Grey. Then after that analysis, she took 60 college students to see and react to the Fifty Shades movie, including asking them to identify whether and how they felt a line was crossed in the romantic relationship depicted in the movie. Dr. Bonomi has continued to facilitate conversations and training in college and high school settings on the relationship between popular culture (such as Fifty Shades of Grey) and expectations for real-world relationships.
All of this work will culminate in her forthcoming book, Recantation and Domestic Violence, The Untold Story (Taylor and Francis Company). The goal of the book, coauthored with David Martin (senior prosecuting attorney in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office), is to improve professional and community responses to recantation by those who have experienced domestic violence, that is, to provide professionals and communities with skills to work better with victims and abusers. This book combats the misconception that someone who experiences an abusive relationship should simply leave; the lived experience of domestic violence is far more complicated than that, including how abusers tamper with and manipulate their victims to recant.
This leads to where she is today: in Flagstaff as the Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives at NAU’s College of Health and Human Services. Dr. Bonomi’s passion-fueled work in the field of healthcare has impacted countless lives for the better, and she is eager to support the strategic goals and initiatives of the College of Health and Human Services and NAU as a whole. Dr. Bonomi will build upon all of her prior work crossing healthcare and her work as founder of Social Justice Associates—an entity that assists organizations in building and implementing strategy through the lens of equity and inclusion.
On top of her professional achievements, Amy enjoys the outdoors as much as anyone else in Flagstaff and is an avid hiker. She has been enthusiastic about helping our community, already making relationships with our healthcare partners and sovereign tribal nations, and getting involved in the local community. Her primary goal is to make the College of Health and Human Services the desired landing spot for students seeking education in health and human services to positively impact communities throughout Arizona.