2010 SCIENTIFIC MEETING -- SPEAKER BIOS

Keynote Speaker     Session I     Session II    Session III   Session IV  

Sunday Workshop   Monday Workshop

RETURN TO CONFERENCE PAGE

Keynote Address

"Reforming Health Behavior Research During AAHB First Decade: Translating Literal Evidence to Literal

Populations and Settings"

Lawrence W. Green, DrPH, ScD(Hon), is Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California at San Francisco and Co-Leader, Program on Society, Diversity, and Disparities, UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center. As Distinguished Fellow-Visiting Scientist at CDC from 1999-2004, he served as Director of CDC’s World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Global Tobacco Control, Acting Director of the Office on Smoking and Health, Director of CDC’s Office of Science and Extramural Research and Associate Director for Prevention Research and Academic Partnerships in the Public Health Practice Program Office. Though he then declared himself retired, he served as Health and Society Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland and Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

In the 1990s, Dr. Green was the Director of the Institute of Health Promotion Research and Professor and Head of the Division of Preventive Medicine and Health Promotion, Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He served as the first Director of the U.S. Office of Health Information and Health Promotion in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health under the Carter Administration, and as Vice President of the Kaiser Family Foundation.  He has been full-time on the public health faculties at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Texas. In all of these roles he has looked with concern at the growing divergence of the scientific literature in health and the needs of policy makers and practitioners for evidence. Dr. Green is a past President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education, recipient of the American Public Health Association's highest awards, and AAHB’s first Research Laureate Medal. He is an Associate Editor of Annual Reviews of Public Health and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of 13 other journals.  His textbooks have been widely adopted. Community and Population Health with Judith Ottoson is in its 8th edition; Health Program Planning: An Educational and Ecological Approach with Marshall Kreuter is in its 4th edition. The latter has been the repository for adaptation of his social- environmental Precede-Proceed model to the more than 1000 published applications of it in case studies, research, evaluations, and other textbooks.

Session I

BEGINNING AT THE END: PROMISING APPROACHES

TO RESEARCH FOR EVIDENCE-BASED

HEALTH BEHAVIOR CHANGE 

Shawna L. Mercer, MSc, PhD is the Director of the Guide to Community Preventive Services (Community Guide). The Community Guide works with a wide range of governmental, academic, policy, and practice-based partners to conduct and disseminate systematic reviews of the effectiveness of community-based interventions in public health — including informational, behavioral, social, environmental, and policy interventions. Dr. Mercer previously served as a scientist in CDC’s Office of the Chief Science Officer and Office of Science and Extramural Research where she explored the use of various study designs for effectiveness and translation research, and assessed the value of participatory research in helping to translate research into practice and policy. She also served as the Evaluation Coordinator for one of the first population-based breast cancer screening programs—charged with taking the results of randomized trials to scale for the province of Ontario, Canada. All of these experiences have informed Dr. Mercer’s focus on building better bridges between research, practice and policy, and on strengthening the use of participatory approaches in translating knowledge into action. 

Enola Proctor, PhD is a nationally recognized for her work in advancing the implementation of evidence-based practices in social service settings and mental health services.  For more than a decade, Dr. Proctor has led the Brown School’s Center for Mental Health Services Research. Continually funded by the National Institute for Mental Health since its inception in 1993, the Center collaborates with its national network of research partners to build a base of evidence designed to address the challenges of delivering mental health services to vulnerable populations.  She works to develop state-of-art methods for studying implementation of evidence-based practice, to advance measurement of implementation outcomes, and to equip researchers for the rapidly evolving field of implementation science. 

C. Tracy Orleans, Ph.D., the Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, leads the Foundation's efforts to identify and disseminate evidence-based strategies for addressing the major behavioral risk factors for chronic disease and premature death.  She is oversees a large portfolio of research grants and national programs designed to discover, test and apply effective clinical, public health, policy and environmental strategies for improving the nation’s health and healthcare.  A nationally recognized expert in health behavior change, she has served as a President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and as a member of the U.S. Preventive Task Force and the CDC Preventive Services Task Force.  Most of her work has focused on tobacco control, chronic illness care, childhood obesity prevention and research-to-practice translation, with a special emphasis on reducing health disparities and on building consumer demand for evidence-based health behavior change. 

Session II

TRANSLATING EVIDENCE-BASED HEALTH

BEHAVIOR RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

Ross Brownson, PhD, is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a leading expert in chronic disease prevention, applied epidemiology, and dissemination research, Professor Brownson is regarded as one of the great intellectual, educational, and practice leaders in the field of evidence-based public health.  Dr. Brownson has a joint appointment with the University’s School of Medicine (Siteman Cancer Center) and School of Social Work. Dr. Brownson co-directs the Prevention Research Center,—a major, CDC funded center jointly led by Washington University and Saint Louis University – that develops innovative approaches to chronic disease prevention. He leads a large number of other major research and training projects funded by a broad array of federal and foundation sources, including the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

Karen M. Emmons, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health and Associate Dean of Research at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Deputy Director of the Center for Community-Based Research (CCBR) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). Her research focuses primarily on community-based approaches to cancer prevention and control, particularly for populations facing significant cancer disparities.  Her expertise is in population-based  interventions for several behavioral risk factors, including smoking, passive smoke, sun exposure, diet, and exercise.

Guy S. Parcel, Ph.D., is a John P. McGovern Professor in Health Promotion at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health. He also serves as professor of behavioral sciences at the UT School of Public Health and professor of pediatrics at the UT-Houston Medical School. Dr. Parcel has directed NIH- and CDC-funded research projects to develop and evaluate programs to address sexual risk behavior in adolescents, diet and physical activity in children, smoking prevention in adolescents, and self-management of childhood chronic diseases including asthma and cystic fibrosis.

Session III

MEASUREMENT ISSUES IN TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH

Lisa M. Klesges, PhD, is Professor and Director of the School of Public Health at the University of Memphis. She is a behavioral epidemiologist with experience conducting epidemiological and health promotion research related to women’s and children’s health. Her recent work includes theory-based behavior change evaluations in two large NIH studies: the HOPE trial to promote physical activity in the working poor; and GEMS, designed to prevent obesity in 8-10 yr old African-American girls. Dr. Klesges has published on the use of the RE-AIM framework for study planning, in reviewing the external validity of childhood obesity in published literature, and in the development of metrics that summarize population intervention impact and other RE-AIM applications.

Dr. John Landsverk is Director of the NIMH funded Child and Adolescent Services Research Center and Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Work at San Diego State University.  He has a doctorate in sociology and has extensive and internationally known research experience in the areas of child maltreatment, children's mental health in mental health services, as well as in the implementation and evaluation of innovative early interventions for families at risk for child abuse and neglect.  He is the PI on the NIMH funded Child and Adolescent Interdisciplinary Welfare (CAIRN) grant that has developed a well functioning national network of researchers involved in research on the implementation and maintenance of evidence based, parent mediated interventions in child welfare settings for the treatment of disruptive disorders and externalizing behavior problems in children and adolescents.

Elizabeth Stuart, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mental Health http://www.jhsph.edu/dept/mh  and the Department of Biostatistics (http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu) of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). Her primary research interests are in statistical methodology for mental health research, particularly relating to causal inference and missing data.  She is a recent recipient of a K25 award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the aims of which are to develop statistical methods to determine when and how results from randomized trials can be generalized to broader populations.  Prior to her position at JHSPH she was a Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research http://www.mathematica-mpr.com. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University in 2004, working under the direction of Donald Rubin.

Session IV

CHALLENGES WITH TRANSLATING EVIDENCE-BASED RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

Aleta Meyer, PhD, is a health scientist administrator in the Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Her research portfolio includes grants that focus on prevention services, workforce focused prevention, community-participatory approaches, positive youth development, violence, and women and gender. Prior to joining NIDA in 2007, she was Associate Professor of Psychology in the Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She received her doctoral training in Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University, with a specialization in prevention research. During the 15 years she was at VCU, Dr. Meyer gained extensive experience in the successful design and implementation of federally funded clinical trials and served as Co-Director for VCU's CDC-funded Academic Center for Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention. The focus of her work has been to translate theory and empirical research from multiple disciplines into effective health promotion and prevention programs for early adolescents. Dr. Meyer has published research in the areas of action research, school-based health promotion (i.e., violence prevention, cancer prevention, and depression prevention), community-university engagement, and positive youth development. She is currently co-editing a volume for Springer titled “Physical Activity as Intervention: Preventing Disease and Promoting Health.”

Karen A. Blase, Ph.D. is a Senior Scientist at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She has been a program developer, researcher, trainer, program evaluator and published author in the human service field for over 30 years. A major interest has been the development, implementation, adaptation and quality improvement of exemplary service models, evidence-based programs and practices, and strategies for effective scale-up and systems change. As part of a research team, Dr. Blase was involved in completing a major review and synthesis of the implementation literature in 2005 resulting in the publication of Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature. This extensive review of implementation science and proposed frameworks is providing guidance for the adoption and utilization of evidence-based programs and practices as well as implementation research agendas.  At FPG, Blase is currently involved in research, evaluation, technical assistance and policy initiatives related to the emerging practice and science of implementation, organizational change and systems transformation. Her current initiatives include serving as PI and Co-Director of an OSEP Technical Assistance Center for State Implementation and Scaling of Evidence-Based Practices (SISEP) as well as Co-Directing the National Implementation Research Network. She is also a team member of the OSEP TA Center on Social Emotional Intervention for Young Children (TACSEI). Other projects include providing TA support to evidence-based programs and practices and assisting in scaling-up designs and evaluations.

Sunday, February 7th

2:00-5:00 pm

Dr. Guy Parcel

There is an additional

charge ($50 members and

students; $75 non-members)

for this workshop.

Limited seats, reserve early.

Pre-Conference Research Workshop

Intervention Mapping: Developing theory- and

evidence-based programs for health education

and health promotion

Intervention Mapping (IM) offers a step-by-step process for creating effective health promotion interventions, using the best information from the behavioral and social sciences and empirical findings. The workshop will be based on Bartholomew, Parcel, Kok, and Gottlieb’s recent text, Health Promotion Planning: An Intervention Mapping Approach. 2nd Ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006. The workshop will serve as an introduction to Intervention Mapping with a presentation of the steps and tasks involved in the planning process as well as examples from actual projects. The six steps of Intervention Mapping include: 1) assessment of needs and capacity 2) specification of program outcomes and change objectives 3) selection of theory-based methods and practical strategies 4) design the intervention program 5) plan for program adoption and implementation and 6) plan for program evaluation. Discussions will enable participants to ask questions about how Intervention Mapping might apply to their intervention projects and how to include Intervention Mapping in translation of evidence-based health behavior interventions.

Guy S. Parcel, Ph.D., is a John P. McGovern Professor in Health Promotion at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health. He also serves as professor of behavioral sciences at the UT School of Public Health and professor of pediatrics at the UT-Houston Medical School. Dr. Parcel has directed NIH- and CDC-funded research projects to develop and evaluate programs to address sexual risk behavior in adolescents, diet and physical activity in children, smoking prevention in adolescents, and self-management of childhood chronic diseases including asthma and cystic fibrosis.

Monday, February 8th

2:00-5:00 pm

Dr. Lisa Klesges

and

Dr. Karen Coleman

There is an additional

charge ($50 members and

students; $75 non-members)

for this workshop.

Limited seats, reserve early.

Optional Research Workshop

RE-AIM EVALUATION FRAMEWORK:

THE POWER OF A POPULATION APPROACH

RE-AIM is a methodological framework of use to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to evaluate health behavior interventions. It can also be applied to the design of interventions to enhance the potential impact of an approach and support future dissemination. This workshop will introduce researchers to specific concepts of Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance aspects of intervention evaluation planning based on the framework introduced by Glasgow and colleagues (see www.re-aim.org). The major approach will be to provide an overview and examples of applications to on-going interventions. Working groups of participants will apply RE-AIM concepts to planning the design and evaluation of selected projects to consider individual and population impact, with brief group presentations and feedback. Discussion will include time to address pros and cons of various measures and metrics, identify evaluation challenges, and answer questions regarding future projects.

Lisa M. Klesges, PhD, is Professor and Director of the School of Public Health at the University of Memphis. She is a behavioral epidemiologist with experience conducting epidemiological and health promotion research related to women’s and children’s health. Her recent work includes theory-based behavior change evaluations in two large NIH studies: the HOPE trial to promote physical activity in the working poor; and GEMS, designed to prevent obesity in 8-10 yr old African-American girls. Dr. Klesges has published on the use of the RE-AIM framework for study planning, in reviewing the external validity of childhood obesity in published literature, and in the development of metrics that summarize population intervention impact and other RE-AIM applications.

Dr. Karen J. Coleman is a Research Scientist in the Research and Evaluation department of Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC). She holds a B.S. in Zoology from Washington State University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Biopsychology from the University of Georgia. She also completed a three year post-doctoral fellowship in behavioral medicine studying the treatment of child obesity. Before joining KPSC, she was an Associate Professor of Public Health at San Diego State University and began her independent work as an Assistant Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso.  Her main areas of focus are health disparities in chronic disease, physical activity promotion and measurement, obesity and diabetes prevention in Hispanic communities, gastric bypass surgical outcomes, child obesity treatment and prevention, program evaluation research, and community-based participatory research.