
Natalie
Pope
Director of PhD Program; Associate Professor
605 Patterson Office Tower
859-218-2768
Home College Directory Dr. Natalie Pope
Dr. Pope is originally from Atlanta, Georgia but has made her home in Lexington KY for more than 10 years. Dr. Pope started her career working in public child welfare, helping families and parents whose children were experiencing abuse or neglect. Her experience as a social worker taught her to adopt a curious posture towards people; she made clients the experts on their own lives, even when she had a case file that was full of family history. Skills that made her an effective practitioner – reflexivity and self-awareness, empathy and sensitivity, ability to carefully observe and describe, also help her to be an effective researcher. After 12+ years of doing research, she identifies as a qualitative researcher and seeks to understand human behavior. Dr. Pope’s happy place is doing in-depth interviews, observing people, getting lost in the messiness of lots of data, and trying to make sense of what she’s seeing in transcripts and field notes. Dr. Pope’s research interests address the broad areas of family caregiving across the life span, as well as behavioral health and well-being of community-dwelling older adults.