 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
Faculty Researchers Lorien Abroms, Ph.D., Dr. Abroms is an assistant professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). Her research focuses on health communication and health promotion with specific attention to: 1) the potential use of the mass media and new communication technologies to reach people with health information, and 2) the design of health education materials which cater to people with low levels of health literacy. Dr. Abroms has overseen the development of numerous health education materials. Past projects include the X-Pack, a smoking cessation kit for young adults, which has won several awards, including the Best Materials Award by the American Public Health Association (2007) and the Gareth Green Award from Harvard University (2002). To date over 20,000 X-Packs have been distributed to help young adult smokers quit smoking. Dr. Abroms has extensive experience with formative research. She has developed scripts and conducted focus groups in the areas of young adult smoking cessation, indoor tanning, sun protection, and environmental lead exposure. Dr. Abroms has conducted training sessions on the role of health literacy in communicating with the public. Past training sessions have taken place at the D.C. Dept. of Health and at a conference addressing contaminants in D.C.’s public water supply. Dr. Abroms teaches classes in health communications and health behavior change to graduate students at George Washington University SPHHS. Susan Blake, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health, is an applied behavioral scientist, with over 25 years of public health research experience. She received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, with a minor in Environmental Psychology, at the University of Arizona. She completed specialty training in Behavioral Medicine and Health Care Psychology, and a three-year, NHLBI-funded post-doctoral fellowship on the behavioral aspects of cardiovascular disease in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, School of Public Health. Since that time, she has conducted applied behavioral research and evaluation studies on the determinants of risk and interventional research in schools, workplaces and communities to prevent adverse health outcomes. Dr. Blake is currently an Associate Research Professor in the School of Public Health & Health Services, Department of Prevention & Community Health. Since joining the faculty at GWU, Dr. Blake has focused her efforts on prevention of infant morbidity/mortality, and pregnancy, HIV and STD risks among minority populations in the District of Columbia. She is Principal Investigator of an NICHD and Office of Minority Health-funded intervention trial with pregnant African American and Hispanic women to prevent environmental tobacco smoke exposure and promote development and safety during infancy (0-12 months). She is also PI of The George Washington University Study of Kidsave Summer Miracles Adoptive Families, a collaborative study with Kidsave International designed to assess the post-adoption adjustment of n=532 American families who adopted older children and adolescents (ages 5-15) from Russian and Colombian orphanages. She is Co-Investigator on a cell-phone based, behaviora l intervention trial to prevent repeat teen pregnancy among African American and Hispanic girls in the District of Columbia, and is collaborating on a national evaluation study of the BodyWorks Toolkit for the Office of Women’s Health. Since joining the faculty at GWU, Dr. Blake has been a PI, Co-PI, or Co-Investigator on several prevention intervention research studies including: the NICHD Initiative to Reduce Infant Mortality in Minority Populations, a randomized multiple risk behavior intervention trial to prevent depression, partner abuse, cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke exposure among pregnant African American and Hispanic women in the District of Columbia; an “Arts-based” dating violence prevention intervention in Baltimore public middle schools; and a parent-child communications intervention to prevent pregnancy among middle school adolescents in Rochester NY. She is currently in the process of publishing data describing the efficacy of the smoking cessation and environmental tobacco smoke prevention intervention for pregnant women and the parent-child communications intervention, and is writing several descriptive papers on gender differences in, and the social contexts for, verbal, physical and sexual aggression and harassment in middle schools using data from the dating violence prevention intervention. Dr. Blake is currently Chair of the GWUMC Adolescent Health Research Workgroup, a university-wide workgroup focused on adolescent health research. She serves on the GWUMC Faculty Senate Committees on Research and Faculty Support Services and Professional Development, and previously served on the SPHHS Research Committee. She also serves as an Academic Preceptor for the GWU ISCOPES program, helping to guide interdisciplinary student teams from GWUMC and George Mason University in community service-learning activities targeting children and adolescents, and serves as a special project and dissertation advisor. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, Society of Behavioral Medicine, American Public Health Association, Society for Adolescent Medicine, and American School Health Association, and serves as a peer reviewer for multiple journals in public health and psychology. As an expert in program development and evaluation, Dr. Blake regularly consults and/ or serves as a technical advisor/evaluation consultant to international, national, state and local health and education agencies, institutes of higher education, and community-based organizations. James Cawley, MPH, PA-C, Professor Cawley and the profession of physician assistant (PA) have grown up together. For 30 years he has worked as a certified practitioner, an educator, a scholar and a leader, playing a pivotal role in moving his field forward. "I was fortunate to have entered the physician assistant profession in its early stages of development, and have been able to describe and analyze its history and evolution within the U.S. health care system," says Professor Cawley. He is director of the School's joint Physician Assistant/MPH program, which he founded and which was the first of its type in the US, training individuals for careers that bridge clinical practice and prevention. At the invitation of the U.S. Bureau of Health Professions, he chaired the Advisory Group on Physician Assistants and the Work Force in 1993, and was principal author of its report to the Council on Graduate Medical Education. Professor Cawley also served as a member of the U.S. Public Health Service National Coordinating Committee on Clinical Preventive Services (1989-95) and as a Primary Care Health Policy Fellow in the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and a former president of the PA Foundation. Mark Edberg, M.A. Ph.D., Mark Edberg is an applied and academic anthropologist with over 18 years’ significant experience in social and community research, primarily in public health. Currently Associate Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health, George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology, Dr. Edberg has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on numerous studies, for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies, focusing on HIV/AIDS, violence, and substance abuse prevention, minority health/disparities in health, and marginalized and at-risk populations. Currently, Dr. Edberg is Principal Investigator (PI) on a four-year research effort to develop and evaluate a youth violence prevention intervention targeting community-modifiable factors (funded by CDC) in a Latino community in the Washington, DC metro area. He is also Co-PI on an effort to evaluate a sexual exploitation/trafficking prevention program, and lead consultant on a community assessment of HIV, STI and hepatitis risk among Latino youth. For the U.S. Office of Minority Health (OMH), he is Co-Project Director on an effort to develop an evaluation framework for efforts by states and U.S. territories to eliminate minority health disparities, and Science Advisor on the continuing implementation of a Uniform Data Set (evaluation) for all OMH-funded activities. Recently, Dr. Edberg was Co-PI on an innovative quantitative/qualitative study for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) on substance abuse and HIV risk among three Southeast Asian populations in the Washington, DC metro area. Dr. Edberg also directed an effort to develop an evaluation data system for all grant programs funded by the U.S. Office of Minority Health (Department of Health and Human Services). This system is now Internet-based, and was the result of two previous projects for the same agency involving in-depth evaluation of agency programs. The Department of Health and Human Services gave this project a Best Practices in Evaluation award. Other recent research efforts include: ethnographic research in the U.S.-Mexico border region on the public image of narcotraffickers, and the relationships between this public image to violence and other risk behaviors (this work is documented in a recent book published by the University of Texas Press); Co-PI for the Washington, DC site under the NIDA Cooperative Agreements to Evaluate HIV/AIDS Risk Behavior Interventions with injection drug and crack users; PI for two small NIH-funded efforts to research and develop strategies for reaching out-of-treatment drug users (for HIV testing) and to reach low-income Hispanic/Latino women towards the goal of increasing use of prenatal care and reducing infant mortality; field ethnographer for a NIDA study on risk behavior among runaway youth; and evaluator, trainer and other positions on a range of community intervention and social marketing projects concerning substance abuse, smoking, HIV/AIDS, and violence. Dr. Edberg has also worked, under USAID contract, in Honduras and Puerto Rico as part of a democracy development project. At the graduate level, Dr. Edberg teaches Health Behavior and Health Education (PH206) and Qualitative Research Methods (PH364); at the undergraduate level he developed and has taught two new courses in Social and Behavioral Theory for Health Education/Promotion (PH121) and the Impact of Culture on Health (PH185). He has also has taught Research Methods in Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychological Anthropology for the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Edberg is the author of a new text for undergraduate social/behavioral theory entitled Essentials of Health Behavior: Social and Behavioral Theory in Public Health (Jones & Bartlett 2007), and has published a number of other books and articles. Dr. Edberg's outside interests include music – he is founder, songwriter, lead guitar and vocals for an original modern-rock group called the Furies (www.furiesmusic.com). In addition to performing at clubs and other venues, the Furies have performed at benefit and social issue-related events. John Grossman, III, M.D., MPH, Ph.D. John Grossman, III, MD, PhD, MPH, FACOG is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Microbiology and Tropical Medicine, Prevention and Community Health, and of Health Services Management and Leadership at the George Washington University. He is also the Executive Vice President of the Society for Gynecologic Investigation. He completed his fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine and also received his MPH and PhD degrees from the George Washington University. Dr. Grossman’s research has focused on maternal and neonatal health outcomes, complications of pregnancy, and perinatal and gynecologic infectious disease. Arthur Seiji Hayashi, M.D., MPH, is assistant professor of Prevention and Community Health and Director of the MPH concentration in Community-Oriented Primary Care. He is also a family physician at Unity Health Care, Inc. where he works with the Chief of Quality to develop a comprehensive database on quality indicators for funded programs. Dr. Hayashi worked with Massachusetts State Representative Ruth Balser from 2000 to 2001 as her health policy advisor where he provided analysis and recommendations for a State Bill to improve cultural competence and linguistic access in mental health care in Massachusetts. Patrik Johansson, M.D., MPH, is Assistant Clinical Professor of Health Sciences at the George Washington University and Deputy Chief Officer at the Greater Southeast Community Hospital in Washington, D.C. Dr. Johansson is currently a consultant to the Families Together: The Connecticut Native American Intergenerational Cancer Survivorship Project. The Lance Armstrong Foundation provided funding for the development of culturally-relevant cancer survivorship education materials to Connecticut tribal populations and to foster connections between Native cancer survivors and the broader community through the “Families Together” project, an intergenerational initiative. He also serves as a consultant to the Office of Minority Health Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Health Assessment at the US Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of this study was to conduct a modified Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System Survey of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Dr. Johansson is also a consultant at the National Institutes of Health Is CIS Reaching Connecticut Native Americans? Understanding Cancer Information Seeking, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Results of this project will provide the foundation for Public Health educators throughout the nation to relocate and evaluate education materials and associated methodologies. Julia Lear, Ph.D., Julia Graham Lear, PhD, is founder and director of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools at George Washington University. As a research professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the School of Public Health and Health Services, she teaches courses on school health. For 20 years she has developed school-based health programs and services as a means of promoting the health of children and adolescents. The results of that work are summarized in a recent Health Affairs article "Health At School: A Hidden Health Care System Emerges from The Shadows," March/April 2007, 26, no. 2 (2007): 409-419. (http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/26/2/409) Beginning in 1986, with support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), she worked with schools and health professionals in the early development of school-based health centers. More recently, 2001 – 2005, she directed a RWJF-funded multi-site grant initiative, Caring for Kids: Expanding Mental and Dental Health Services through School-Based Health Centers. And currently, the Center and its staff is undertaking an initiative to support school-community partnerships to expand mental health services for children with unmet needs, especially children of immigrants and refugees. The Center is also exploring the roles of school nurses and school-based health centers in addressing the epidemic of childhood overweight and sponsored an invitational conference on that topic in Spring 2006. Presentations and a conference report are found on the Center web site, www.healthinschools.org. Dr. Lear writes and speaks frequently on the organization of health care for children and adolescents and particularly addresses the interface of education and health systems. She serves on advisory boards of several organizations dedicated to improving child health, including the National Academies/Institute of Medicine Committee on Adolescent Health Care Services and Models of Care for Treatment, Prevention, and Healthy Development, the National Education Association Health Information Network and the National Coordinating Council for School Health. She graduated from Brown University and received her doctorate from Tufts University. Karen McDonnell, Ph.D., Dr. McDonnell is a public health psychologist whose interest lies in the application of quantitative and qualitative methods to behavioral research of relevance to women's health. Dr. McDonnell conducts research on the determinants of psychosocial adjustment and quality of life among women with chronic pelvic pain, women living with HIV and survivors of intimate partner violence. Dr. McDonnell is also interested in the association between occupational stressors and health, treatment decision making, measurement and analytic issues, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods. She received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1998. Her areas of skills and expertise include health education, health promotion, community health among elderly populations, women’s health issues, violence, program planning, mental health, HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, health over the lifespan, health policy and health services research, public health, program and policy evaluation, qualitative and quantitative data analysis. She currently serves as Assistant Professor/Director, Maternal and Child Health Program, The George Washington University Medical Center and Adjunct/Consultant, Women and Children’s Health Policy Center, Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, and the Center for Injury Prevention of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Veronica Miller, Ph.D, Professor Miller's intellectual journey has taken her from JW Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where she directed an interdisciplinary HIV clinical research program, to GW, where she oversees a group that helps to shape the HIV research agenda for the future. "Early on, we recognized the need to learn from each patient and set of patients participating in clinical studies," she says, which led her to help establish the Frankfurt HIV cohort. Studies of that population have generated important data about treatment effectiveness and viral drug resistance, and influenced regulatory policy in Europe and North America. With knowledge evolving rapidly, Professor Miller also co-founded and chaired the EuroGuidelines Group in 1999 to create uniform standard-of-care guidelines across the continent. In becoming Director of the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research, which works to advance clinical research and translate results into patient care, Professor Miller has emphasized the importance of involving all stakeholders in driving the field of HIV treatment forward. Under her leadership, the Forum has expanded to include a focus on global HIV issues. In addition to her academic appointment in the Department of Prevention and Community Health, Professor Miller holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and of Health Policy. Ayman El-Mohandes, MD, MPH is a practicing Neonatologist and an academic Public Health professional. He is a seasoned researcher, with uninterrupted NIH funding since 1994. He also received funding from the CDC and HRSA, and served as a senior technical consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Asia Development Bank (ADB), and WHO. He is nationally and internationally recognized as an expert in neonatal and perinatal epidemiology, and community based research. Dr. El-Mohandes was selected as the Executive Principal Investigator of the NICHD Initiative to Reduce Infant Mortality in Minority Populations “Project HOPE” between 2002-2004. During that time, aside from his role as a scientific principal investigator, he was in charge of all the aspects of implementing this multi-site multi-disciplinary $20 million interventional program. Dr. El-Mohandes supervised a team of sixteen research staff recruiting and delivering an intervention at six clinical sites. The project evaluated the implementation of a tailored intervention delivered at the time of prenatal care to help women who experienced family violence, depression, smoking or any combination of these three significant risks. This project recruited more than 1000 pregnant mothers and retained more than 90% over three years. Dr. El-Mohandes also conducted a community-based randomized trial following health care utilization patterns of minority residents of DC, testing the efficacy of an intervention, delivered in the homes, targeting women who had used no prenatal care or used it poorly. Currently Dr. El-Mohandes is the Principal Investigator for the next phase of the NICHD-DC Initiative to Reduce Infant Mortality in Minority Populations, Project DC-STEP, Stop Tobacco Exposure in Pregnancy. This project comprises two clinical trials to assess methods of helping women quit smoking while they are pregnant and to reduce the influence of environmental tobacco smoke exposure on them and their infants. This project includes partnerships with two major clinical sites providing prenatal care to women in the District of Columbia. In addition to which, Dr. El-Mohandes also received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to analyze predictive scoring systems for obstetric morbidity. Dr. El-Mohandes graduated in 1974 from Cairo University Medical School. Prior to moving to the US in 1982, he was appointed faculty in the Department of Pediatrics at Cairo University, and taught there for one year. He is completely fluent culturally and linguistically in Arabic. He retains a faculty appointment as an Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics in Cairo University. Dr. El-Mohandes was involved in the Egyptian Perinatal Study (funded by USAID) where 180,000 families, a national representative sample, was selected and interviewed. Verbal autopsies and detailed interviewing focused on morbidity and mortality events. Dr. El-Mohandes designed a regional epidemiological survey (funded by Asia Development Bank) in Kyrgyzstan (Central Asian Republic) to collect primary data on reproductive risk. Finally Dr. El-Mohandes helped design and analyze the results of a survey in Indonesia (funded by USAID) using a representative sample of the islands of Java and Sumatra also focusing on perinatal and child health. In many of these collaborative projects Dr. El-Mohandes was directly involved in developing questionnaires, training interviewers, data collection and organization. He was also directly involved in designing sound recruitment, consenting and retention strategies and procedures. Karen Pomerantz, M.L.S., M.P.H. is a Research Scientist in the PRC and Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health of SPHHS. She is the Principal Investigator for a "Partners for Health Information", funded by the National Library of Medicine. She is the GWU Coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Public Health Training Center grant from the CDC. She teaches in the Community Oriented Primary Health Care track and has served for a number of years on the ISCOPES Steering Committee and as a faculty mentor. She is a consultant to the several community organizations funded by the National Library of Medicine, providing curriculum and training support for HIV/AIDS health information outreach programs. Olga Acosta-Price, PhD is deputy director of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools and associate research professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health. Olga Acosta Price received her Masters and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, after having acquired a degree in psychology from Vassar College and completing a pre-doctoral internship with the Devereux Foundation, where she worked with adolescents in residential treatment. She has advocated for the development of school-based health care and currently serves as Co-President of the Board of Directors of the DC Assembly on School Based Health Care. Dr. Acosta Price has written numerous articles and chapters on children’s mental health and school-based services and has presented at a variety of national conferences and meetings throughout the last ten years. Her major research activities have been in the areas of school mental health, prevention, resilience, community violence, program development, and program evaluation. She is licensed to practice psychology in both Maryland and the District of Columbia and is Spanish-speaking. Dr. Acosta Price has won numerous awards and recognitions throughout the course of her training and career including the Department of Mental Health, Employee of the Year Award. Caroline H. Sparks, Ph.D., Caroline Sparks, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Director of the Health Promotion program in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. She is a licensed psychologist with expertise in behavioral health and adolescent psychology. Professor Sparks teaches graduate-level courses in health intervention planning, administration, and program evaluation, as well as applications of theory in health promotion at the individual, small group, and community level. In both her teaching and research, Dr. Sparks promotes the value of community-level interventions to address public health challenges. She has developed programs to promote tobacco-free environments and HIV/AIDS education, and to prevent violence against women, and has consulted with national and local organizations addressing these and other health issues. Dr. Sparks has been the Principal Investigator for numerous grants and contracts, including a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded evaluation of a youth curriculum to promote a tobacco-free environment; an evaluation of school programs to prevent violence; and a program to train medical students in complementary and alternative medicine. She has served as an evaluator for geriatric training projects, and electronic health information projects. Her experience in tobacco control includes serving as an evaluator to monitor the progress of state tobacco control coalitions for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s SmokeLess States Initiative. She assisted the National Education Association Health Information Network in the development and evaluation of a school-based youth advocacy model curriculum and developed some of the first instruments to measure outcomes of youth advocacy programs. She assisted the Washington D.C. Health Department’s development of a youth leadership training program to prevent tobacco use that received funding from the American Legacy Foundation. She recently served on an Institute of Medicine Committee that has published a report (Bonnie, R & Stratton, K. (eds), 2007) "Ending the tobacco problem: A blueprint for the nation" and authored the chapter in that report on advocacy as a tobacco control strategy. Dr. Sparks is a reviewer for two journals focused on health promotion. She has served as a consultant on HIV/AIDS issues for the American Psychological Association and also has been a member of the Advisory Committee for the American Psychological Association's Adolescent Health Project and for an APA program to prevent early childhood violence. She is the co-author of a book on HIV/AIDS and Community Mental Health. Dr. Sparks is currently working as program evaluator for several community agencies and conducts workshops on health intervention design and evaluation. Dr. Sparks often applies a participatory research approach to her work with community coalitions, and has evaluated numerous programs, including the Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded SmokeLess States Initiative for tobacco control. She conducts trainings for community-based organizations in program evaluation. Amita Vyas, PhD. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health who teaches courses in adolescent health and reproductive health in the Maternal and Child Health program. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a specialty in Population Dynamics and was employed as Research Faculty in the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease. She served as the Director for the evaluation of three innovative adolescent reproductive health programs in four family planning centers. She is the Principal Investigator for a CDC-funded study that explores multi-level influences on contraceptive use and unintended pregnancy among adolescents and is Co-Investigator for a CDC-funded program to improve the health of urban adolescents. Richard A. Windsor, Ph.D., MPH is a Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health in the School of Public Health and Health Services at the George Washington University. He is a nationally recognized expert in evaluation of smoking cessation projects in large public health departments at the local and statewide levels. He has specific expertise in process evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis. Dr. Windsor was the 1997 recipient of the C. Everett Koop Award in recognition for his contribution in smoking cessation during pregnancy. Dr. Windsor is the lead author of an evaluation textbook: Evaluation of Health Promotion, Health Education, and Disease Prevention Programs. Dr. Windsor has served as chairperson of numerous dissertation committees for students at the University of Alabama. PRC Research Assistant StaffResearch staff as of December 2007 include:
|
|
| © 2003 The George Washington University Medical
Center, Prevention Research Center Site Maintained by: Biomedical Communications | Last updated: March 24, 2008 |