About

Maichou Lor, PhD, RN, FAAN, is an Associate Professor and the Helen Denne Schulte Professor of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Nursing. Her overall research program aims to reduce health disparities by improving symptom management and quality of life for patients with communication challenges, particularly those with limited English proficiency (LEP). Her research focuses on exploring the influence of cultural, language, and historical factors on communication, as well as designing and testing culturally and linguistically innovative health assessment approaches for LEP patients using applied informatics. Her areas of focus include health equity, language and interpreting access, health literacy, and the development of culturally and linguistically appropriate health interventions. She also concentrates on health issues affecting minority populations, such as Hmong health, symptom science, palliative care, pain assessment, and aging and care for older adults. Her work involves addressing biological, psychological, and social factors impacting pain reporting, and developing health interventions involving family caregivers to support older adults, including addressing hearing loss among minority older adults. Dr. Lor's contributions are centered on advancing health systems and public health through her research on health disparities and culturally competent care.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Gerontology
• Law
• Audiology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Enhancing Data Integrity in Online Health Surveys Through Multi‑Layered Security Measures: A Cross-sectional Study (Preprint)

  2026-02-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  <sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> A multi‑layered fraud‑mitigation approach is essential to ensure data integrity in medical survey research; basic measures alone (e.g. captcha) would permit widespread fraud. </sec>

  PublisherDOI

• Pilot study: Training bilingual Hmong caregivers using the pain assessment information visualization tool for effective communication in healthcare

  Patient Education and Counseling · 2026-01-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Empowering your kids”: Parenting among 1.5- and second-generation HMong American mothers.

  Asian American Journal of Psychology · 2026-03-26

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Breast Cancer Awareness and Risk Education for Asian Americans (Breast CARE): a community-based patient education program for breast cancer screening and prevention

  BMC Primary Care · 2026-04-30

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• SITA: Learning Speaker-Invariant and Tone-Aware Speech Representations for Low-Resource Tonal Languages

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-01-14

  preprintOpen access

  Tonal low-resource languages are widely spoken yet remain underserved by modern speech technology. A key challenge is learning representations that are robust to nuisance variation such as gender while remaining tone-aware for different lexical meanings. To address this, we propose SITA, a lightweight adaptation recipe that enforces Speaker-Invariance and Tone-Awareness for pretrained wav2vec-style encoders. SITA uses staged multi-objective training: (i) a cross-gender contrastive objective encourages lexical consistency across speakers, while a tone-repulsive loss prevents tone collapse by explicitly separating same-word different-tone realizations; and (ii) an auxiliary Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)-based ASR objective with distillation stabilizes recognition-relevant structure. We evaluate primarily on Hmong, a highly tonal and severely under-resourced language where off-the-shelf multilingual encoders fail to represent tone effectively. On a curated Hmong word corpus, SITA improves cross-gender lexical retrieval accuracy, while maintaining usable ASR accuracy relative to an ASR-adapted XLS-R teacher. We further observe similar gains when transferring the same recipe to Mandarin, suggesting SITA is a general, plug-in approach for adapting multilingual speech encoders to tonal languages.

  PublisherDOI

• SITA: Learning Speaker-Invariant and Tone-Aware Speech Representations for Low-Resource Tonal Languages

  ArXiv.org · 2026-01-14

  articleOpen access

  Tonal low-resource languages are widely spoken yet remain underserved by modern speech technology. A key challenge is learning representations that are robust to nuisance variation such as gender while remaining tone-aware for different lexical meanings. To address this, we propose SITA, a lightweight adaptation recipe that enforces Speaker-Invariance and Tone-Awareness for pretrained wav2vec-style encoders. SITA uses staged multi-objective training: (i) a cross-gender contrastive objective encourages lexical consistency across speakers, while a tone-repulsive loss prevents tone collapse by explicitly separating same-word different-tone realizations; and (ii) an auxiliary Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)-based ASR objective with distillation stabilizes recognition-relevant structure. We evaluate primarily on Hmong, a highly tonal and severely under-resourced language where off-the-shelf multilingual encoders fail to represent tone effectively. On a curated Hmong word corpus, SITA improves cross-gender lexical retrieval accuracy, while maintaining usable ASR accuracy relative to an ASR-adapted XLS-R teacher. We further observe similar gains when transferring the same recipe to Mandarin, suggesting SITA is a general, plug-in approach for adapting multilingual speech encoders to tonal languages.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Positive Malnutrition Risk Factors Pre-Transplant Are Associated with Adverse Outcomes After Simultaneous Kidney and Pancreas and Solitary Pancreas Transplantation

  American Journal of Transplantation · 2025-08-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Experiences of Hmong Women in the Perinatal Period

  Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing · 2025-03-30 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Communicating pain through storytelling: how Hmong patients' messages get missed in consultations

  Patient Education and Counseling · 2025-07-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disparities in Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences Among Asian American Emerging Adults Ethnic Groups

  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities · 2025-08-27

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Information Visualization to Improve Pain Communication Between Providers, Interpreters, and Patients with Limited English Proficiency

  NIH · $480k · 2020–2024

• A Mode of Data Collection for Non-English Speaking Older Adults from Collectivist Cultures

  NIH · $45k · 2016–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Nereida Congost‐Maestre

  University of Alicante

  16 shared

• Roger Brown

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  15 shared

• Theresa A. Koleck

  University of Pittsburgh

  10 shared

• Barbara J. Bowers

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

• Debra Saliba

  RAND Corporation

  9 shared

• Elizabeth O’Donnell

  8 shared

• Adriana Arcia

  University of San Diego

  7 shared

• Suzanne Bakken

  Columbia University Irving Medical Center

  6 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Nursing

  Columbia University

• MS, Nursing

  University of Wisconsin Madison

• Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), School of Nursing

  University of Wisconsin Madison

  2017