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RAND Health Staff
Ellen Beckjord
Ellen Beckjord (PhD, Clinical Psychology, University of Vermont) is an Associate Health Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her doctoral work in Clinical Psychology focused on psychosocial outcomes among breast cancer survivors and she completed her clinical internship at the Vanderbilt-VA Internship Consortium. Prior to joining RAND, Dr. Beckjord was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Her first year of fellowship was spent obtaining an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and she went on to join the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch in NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences. Dr. Beckjord’s research has focused on health communication, including projects addressing the role of affect in information processing, use of health information technology to facilitate patient-provider communication, and health information management, particularly among cancer survivors. Her research aims to promote an effective health information environment that positively impacts health behavior and outcomes across multiple contexts, and she has specific interests in women’s health, cancer survivorship, and the use of eHealth applications to improve health care quality
Rachel Burns
Rachel Burns (MPH, Epidemiology, University of Michigan) is a research assistant at RAND, working on projects within the Center for Health and Safety in the Workplace and the Center for Military Health Policy Research. Her current work focuses on the effects of organizational factors on injuries and lost work time among nursing home staff; post-deployment mental, behavioral, and cognitive health patterns and services for military personnel; evaluation of educational materials for traumatic brain injury awareness among military members and their families; and the psychological effects of deployment on children and families of military members. Prior to joining RAND, she worked as a research assistant for Dr. Theresa Osypuk at the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan, studying neighborhood effects on health outcomes.
Matthew Chinman
Matthew Chinman (PhD, Clinical Psychology, University of South Carolina) is a Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation where his recent focus has been to develop strategies to enhance the prevention capacity of community-based prevention practitioners. As such, he co-developed the Getting To Outcomes (GTO) model and led the development and testing of several Getting to Outcomes-based guides that are aimed at assisting local communities in planning, implementing, and evaluating prevention programs in the areas of substance abuse prevention, underage drinking prevention, and youth development. Dr. Chinman is also a Health Science Specialist at the VISN-4 Mental Illness, Research, and Clinical Center at the Pittsburgh VA. At the VA, his overall focus is developing and testing various interventions to improve the recovery of individuals with serious mental illnesses. As part of that focus, he recently has been developing and assessing strategies that involve mental health consumers in service providing roles in order to improve the quality of their care.
Jake Dembosky
Jake Dembosky (MPM, University of Maryland) is a project associate at RAND, where he serves as a project manager and research assistant on projects in education and health, including a multi-year evaluation of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s patient safety initiative; an analysis of state efforts to improve policy, planning, and programmatic activities for people with co-occurring mental and addictive disorders; a plan for improving the delivery of maternal and child health care services in Allegheny County; an investigation of the ways in which school districts in Southwestern Pennsylvania are pursuing data-driven decisionmaking; and a study to estimate the impacts of providing value-added assessment results to teachers, principals, and district administrators in Pennsylvania. On these and other projects, he assists with survey and interview protocol development, data collection, data analysis, and report writing.
Andrew W. Dick
Andrew Dick (PhD, Economics, Stanford University) is a senior economist at RAND. Before joining RAND in 2005, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester where he maintains an adjunct faculty position. While there he was the director and principal investigator of the Pre and Post-Doctoral NRSA Training grant. He has completed three evaluations of the New York State Child Health Plus program (New York’s version of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP]) and led several multi-state studies to determine SCHIP’s effects on access, utilization, quality, and satisfaction as well as the dynamics of enrollment and how the program interacts with Medicaid and private insurance. He has led the economics team on an MCHB funded center to study financing of care for children with special health care needs. He is the principal investigator of the MADIT CRT-D cost-effectiveness study, a world-wide study including over 1,500 subjects in nearly 100 sites that will determine the health effects and cost consequences of cardiac resynchronization devices in implantable defibrillators. He has also been the principal investigator of a National Cancer Institute (NIH) grant to determine the cost-effectiveness of treatments for Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, a localized form of breast cancer. He has published numerous articles on risk-adjustment methods for assessing quality.
Tamara Dubowitz
Tamara Dubowitz (ScD, Harvard School of Public Health; SM, Harvard School of Public Health; MSc, University of Pennsylvania) is an associate policy researcher at RAND trained in social epidemiology with concentrations in maternal and child health and public health nutrition. Her research interests include neighborhood effects, particularly those related to the built physical and social environment, obesity and diet related disease, and the health and nutrition effects of social policy (e.g., housing policy, food stamps, and WIC) and monitoring and evaluation. Her work has utilized both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine individuals within their social and structural contexts, immigrant status and duration of residence in the United States, structure of the workday, access to childcare and competing daily-life constraints alongside of neighborhood socioeconomic status and racial composition. Dr. Dubowitz has also worked internationally on women’s health programs and development with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, West Africa, and an evaluation of a maternal and child nutrition program led by UNICEF India. More recently, she has looked at factors of the built environment and their association with prevalence of obesity in Pittsburgh, Pa.
John Engberg
John B. Engberg (PhD, Economics, University of Wisconsin—Madison) is a senior economist at RAND. Dr. Engberg has worked on a variety of health policy and health care research projects, with an emphasis on using longitudinal non-experimental data to infer causality. Examples include his examination of the impact of organizational and market factors on the efficiency of health maintenance organizations and his analysis of transient psychological factors that lead to smoking cessation and relapse. He is currently principal investigator of a CMS study to evaluate demonstration projects aimed at improving opportunities for home care workers and co-principal Investigator on a multi-year evaluation of tobacco settlement programming expenditures on smoking behavior and health outcomes in Arkansas. He joined RAND in 2002 after fourteen years on the faculty of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University. He completed post-doctoral training in psychiatric statistics, jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Statistics and University of Pittsburgh’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. He also served as the research director of the Carnegie Mellon Census Data Research Center, one of only a few places in the country where researchers can obtain access to confidential Census data.
Donna Farley
Donna O. Farley (PhD, Policy Analysis, RAND Graduate School; MPH, Environmental Health Management, University of Illinois) is a senior health policy analyst at RAND and co-director of the RAND-University of Pittsburgh Health Institute. She has broad health policy research experience coupled with more than 15 years in executive health care management. Dr. Farley heads RAND’s Patient Safety Evaluation Center, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is evaluating the federal government’s national patient safety initiative. She also is leading a longitudinal evaluation of quality improvement initiatives to improve teamwork practices, currently being undertaken by hospital labor and delivery units in five civilian and military hospitals. She co-directs RAND’s team in the Consumer Assessment of Health Systems and Providers (CAHPS) project and is heading the quality improvement component of the project. Earlier in the CAHPS project, she had managed three demonstration projects with state Medicaid programs and evaluated the impact of CAHPS® reports on Medicaid recipients’ choice of health plan. She served as principal investigator of a contract with the state of Arkansas to evaluate its tobacco settlement funds program, leading the first four years of this evaluation project. Dr. Farley previously co-directed a five-year project with the Army Medical Department that tested use of continuous quality improvement techniques to implement clinical practice guidelines in Army health facilities. She was principal investigator for two Medicare research projects: a study of special Medicare payment policies for rural health care providers, and the evaluation of Senior Prime, a Medicare managed care plan offered on a trial basis by DoD.
Walid Gellad
Walid F Gellad (MD, University of Maryland School of Medicine, MPH, Harvard School of Public Health) is an associate natural scientist at RAND and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a core faculty member of the VA Pittsburgh Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP). Prior to joining RAND, Dr. Gellad was an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and completed health services research training at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research focuses on policy issues affecting access to medications for seniors, including Medicare Part D and prescription drug costs. Dr. Gellad is board certified in Internal Medicine and completed a residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He sees primary care patients at the Pittsburgh VA and attends on the inpatient general medical service.
Michael Greenberg
Michael Greenberg (PhD, Psychology, Duke University; JD, Harvard University) is a clinical psychologist and a lawyer. Prior to joining RAND, he worked as an attorney at Ropes & Gray, a large Boston law firm, and held a psychology internship at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. Dr.Greenberg’s work at RAND has included empirical research projects on topics spanning health care, civil justice, and national security. Two recent examples include studies of policy challenges for the implementation of scalable physician-level performance measurements, and of opportunities for quality-improvement interventions in hospital-based care for depression. Dr. Greenberg is broadly interested in policy problems related to the delivery of health care, and at the interface between the health care system, government regulation, and the civil justice system. He is currently leading or co-leading several research projects at RAND, including a survey of medical malpractice plaintiffs’ attorneys; a study of threat and liability issues connected with maritime terrorism; and (for the U.S. Army), a study of personnel issues and challenges connected with recent mobilizations by the Army National Guard.
Amelia Haviland
Amelia Haviland (PhD, Statistics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University) is an associate statistician at RAND. Her research focuses on longitudinal data analysis, adapting statistical methods for complex survey data, and causal analysis with observational data. Previously at the University of Pittsburgh Epidemiology Data Center, she worked with the NHLBI Dynamic Registry team to investigate gender and racial differences in health outcomes. Her previous research also includes using nonparametric methods to assess gender and racial wage gaps with complex educational survey data and using Bayesian methods to compare the effectiveness of food pantries and food stamps in alleviating food insecurity. In these projects, she worked extensively with large government datasets, such as the Long Form of the Decennial Census and the National Survey of College Graduates. Dr. Haviland consulted with the NSF on the ongoing development of the SESTAT system of databases.Currently she works with large health databases such as the HCUP NIS and the MCBS on a project evaluating AHRQ’s Patient Safety Initiative. She is also creating the sample design for a study of the impacts of consumer directed health care; refining and expanding the methodology to address causal analyses (Nagin and Haviland, forthcoming); investigating the effects of first time gang membership on violence over time among high-risk youth and testing whether these effects differ by developmental trajectory group (Nagin and Haviland, forthcoming); and for the IMPACT study, investigating the effects of trauma on drug use and high-risk sexual behavior.
Todd Helmus
Todd Helmus (PhD, Clinical Psychology, Wayne State University) conducted health- related research in both sleep and substance abuse fields prior to joining RAND. While continuing this work, Dr. Helmus has recently focused on national security related interests. Recent research projects include an evaluation of acute psychological reactions to urban combat and strategic and operational lessons learned for joint urban operations in OIF and OEF. Current areas of research include psychological operations, terrorist radicalization process, stress in family's of deployed servicemen, and post-combat mental health.
Donna Keyser
Donna J. Keyser (PhD, Yale University; MBA, Columbia Business School) is a senior communications analyst at RAND and associate director of the RAND-University of Pittsburgh Health Institute. Currently at RAND, she serves as co-principal investigator of a region-wide community-based effort to improve maternal and child health care policy and practice in Allegheny County, and of a nation-wide effort to support the development of interdisciplinary research and training in geriatric health care. In addition, she has worked on projects analyzing institutional roles in promoting research mentoring and the responsible conduct of research, and well as qualitative studies to understand, measure, and improve health care processes and outcomes in areas such as maternal and child health care, chronic care management, mental and behavioral health, and patient safety. In addition, she assists RAND research staff with the development of new proposals and research communications products. Previously, Dr. Keyser served as associate director for the Center on Japanese Economy and Business at Columbia Business School, and associate director for the U.S.-Japan Program of the Japan Society, Inc. in New York. Between 1987 and 1989, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Tokyo, Japan.
Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo
Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo (PhD, Developmental Psychology, Columbia University) is an associate researcher at RAND and a member of the Los Angeles Families and Neighborhood Survey (LA FANS) research team, which focuses on children and maternal mental health outcomes. Prior to joining RAND in June 2002, she worked at the Center for Children and Families (CCF) at Columbia University, where she directed the New York site for the Qualitative Addition to the Fragile Families Study, a tri-city study focusing on parent’s allocations of financial and emotional resources to their newborn child, and examined child care center policies for addressing children’s emotional needs using focus groups (Lara, McCabe, & Brooks-Gunn, 2000). Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Dr. Lara-Cinisomo’s current research focuses on how neighborhood context is associated with child and youth emotional well-being. Her recent studies have focused on major depression among mothers in LA and children of immigrants and depressive behaviors. Currently, Lara-Cinisomo is the principal investigator for a joint longitudinal study with UCLA that examines links between early childhood learning settings and child cognitive and socioemotional outcomes.
Hangshen Liu
Hangsheng Liu (PhD, Health Services Research and Policy, University of Rochester) is an Associate Policy Research at RAND. His research interests include health policy, health economics, especially in quality of care, health insurance and managed care, and health care markets. His PhD dissertation is about the effect of managed care plan performance on plan choice and disenrollment in the New York State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Recently, he published a paper on non-price competition among managed care plans and quality of care in Health Services Research. In addition, he was involved in studies on the Medicare managed care payment system (CMS-HCC risk adjustment model). Currently, he is working on episode-based pay-for-performance measurement and payment options with Drs. Cheryl Damberg and Melony Sorbero.
Susan Lovejoy
Susan Lovejoy (MS, Health Care Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University) is a project associate at RAND, where she is supporting a number of health care-related research projects including a community-based initiative to improve maternal and child health care in the Pittsburgh area, an evaluation of the Arkansas tobacco settlement funds program, a review of physician pay-for-performance programs, and several projects within RAND’s Patient Safety Evaluation Center. Prior to joining RAND, she worked as an intern and a consultant on several community health care initiatives and had a career in the financial services sector. She is president of the Board of the Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh and recently served on the Pressley Ridge Board and the Allegheny County MH/MR Advisory Board.
Steve Martino
Steven C. Martino (PhD, Psychology, University of Minnesota) is a behavioral scientist at RAND. The primary focus of his research is identifying social and personality processes relevant to adolescent health behaviors. In one line of study, Martino is investigating social and psychological factors that impact drug use in adolescence, and the consequences of adolescent drug use for adult functioning. In a second line of study, he is investigating the influence of television viewing and other media on the sexual beliefs and behaviors of adolescents. In a third line of study, he is examining the influence of parent-child communication on the development of teen sexual behavior.
Dan McCaffrey
Daniel McCaffrey (Ph.D., Statistics, North Carolina State) is a Senior Statistician at RAND and Head of the RAND statistics group. Dr. McCaffrey has extensive experience analyzing complex survey data from his work on HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study where he developed variance estimation methods and his work on the review of the mental health and substance abuse block grant formula and the estimation of drug use prevalence in California which involved modeling the data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Recently Dr. McCaffrey has worked on RAND's Adolescent Outcomes Project that is using propensity score methods to estimate the effects of different treatment programs by comparing outcomes for youths assigned to the various programs.
Ateev Mehrotra
Ateev Mehrotra (MD, University of California, San Francisco; MPH, University of California, Berkeley; MS, Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health) is a policy analyst at RAND and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. Prior to joining RAND, he worked as a researcher at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. His research has focused on the measurement and reporting of health care quality data. In previous work, he has evaluated the use of report cards created by employer coalitions and he recently completed as part of a Robert Wood Johnson sponsored Rewarding Results initiative an evaluation of the impact of pay-for-performance incentives on Massachusetts physician groups. Dr. Mehrotra is board certified in both internal medicine and pediatrics. He completed his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Boston. His clinical work has been both as a primary care physician and as an adult and pediatric hospitalist.
John Mendeloff
John Mendeloff (PhD, Graduate School of Public Policy, University of California-Berkeley) recently joined RAND's Policy Sciences group as the Director of the RAND Center for Health & Safety in the Workplace. John is a professor in and director of the public management and policy program in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He also has joint appointments in the School of Law and in the Graduate School of Public Health in the Health Services Administration and Environmental and Occupational Health departments. He taught at the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California-San Diego, and SUNY-Albany before coming to the University of Pittsburgh. His research has focused on government regulation of health and safety risks, especially by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. He is also currently studying the FDA's regulation of new drugs. His other research interests have included trauma care, mental health services, and organ procurement.
Christopher Nelson
Christopher Nelson (PhD, Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is a political scientist at RAND. His work on occupational safety and health has focused on the linkages between organizational processes and organizational safety outcomes. This work has included projects on participatory safety rules revisions, behavioral feedback systems, process improvement methods, and fatigue management in the U.S. railroad industry. Dr. Nelson is also coauthor of a forthcoming examination of the role of firm and establishment size in worker fatality rates. Recently, he was appointed acting director of the RAND Center for Health and Safety in the Workplace, a multidisciplinary research center based in RAND’s Pittsburgh Office. His interest in safety also extends to public health emergency preparedness (including bioterrorism, pandemic influenza, and other threats). He is currently leading an HHS-funded effort to develop a new system for assessing state and local capacity to receive and distribute materiel from the Strategic National Stockpile. Other recently completed projects were designed to (a) improve the quality of federal bioterrorism guidance and performance measures, (b) examine applications of quality improvement methods to public health emergency preparedness, and (c) understand the role of state-local governance structures in public health preparedness.
Stuart Olmsted
Dr. Stuart Olmsted (PhD, Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University) is a natural scientist at RAND. At Johns Hopkins, he studied and tested reproductive technologies including contraceptives and microbicides for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in microbiology at the Magee-Womens Research Institute in Pittsburgh. He joined RAND in 2002 and has worked on policy issues focusing on bioterrorism, public health preparedness, military health technologies and biotechnology. He has worked on a number of projects related to health care technology/biotech including the evaluation of an electronic diary system designed to gather patient responses to the smallpox vaccination, an evaluation of best practices at human tissue repositories for genomics-/proteomics-based research and a project modeling the benefits of diagnostic health technologies for the developing world.
John Pane
John Pane (PhD, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University) is an information scientist at RAND. Pane’s research focuses on math and science education and the roles of technology in education. He is currently directing an experimental study of a technology-based geometry curriculum in a Maryland school district; the evaluation of a comprehensive Math and Science Partnership in Pennsylvania; and a study of the effects of hurricane displacement on students in Louisiana. He has also studied educators’ use of achievement, demographics, and other data for decision making, and evaluated a school district initiative where laptop computers were issued to all students in grades 3-12. Dr. Pane has expertise in human-computer interaction, computer interface design, randomized controlled experiments on the effectiveness of educational software in laboratory and school settings, and the impact of new technologies on individuals and organizations. Sponsors of Dr. Pane’s research have included the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army, the Heinz Endowments, and the Grable Foundation.
Andrew Parker
Andrew M. Parker (PhD, Behavioral Decision Theory, MS, Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University) is an associate behavioral scientist at RAND. His research applies core concepts in behavioral decision research to the understanding of individual decision makers’ behavior in complex real-world situations. Past projects focusing on decision quality and risk perception have addressed low-income consumption, adolescent sexual and contraceptive behavior, drug and alcohol use, and teen expectations for major life events. In work with collaborators (Baruch Fischhoff and Wändi Bruine de Bruin) at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Parker was principal investigator on a project validating an adult measure of decision-making competence, which has been used to predict major life outcomes.
Harold Pincus
Harold A. Pincus (MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine) is a Senior Scientist at RAND. Dr. Pincus is also the Vice Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Director of Quality and Outcomes Research at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Associate Director of Columbia’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Previously he was Director of the RAND-University of Pittsburgh Health Institute and Executive Vice Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he still maintains an adjunct professorship. He is the National Director of the Health and Aging Policy Fellows Program (funded by Atlantic Philanthropies), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s National Program on Depression in Primary Care: Linking Clinical and Systems Strategies and the John A. Hartford Foundation’s national program on Building Interdisciplinary Geriatric Research Centers. Dr. Pincus has also served as the Deputy Medical Director of the American Psychiatric Association and the founding director of APA’s Office of Research and Executive Director of the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education. Prior to joining the APA, he was the Special Assistant to the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Kerry Reynolds
Kerry A. Reynolds, (Ph.D., Social/Health Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University), is an Associate Behavioral/Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her work broadly addresses adolescence and adjustment to chronic illness. Much of her work has focused on individuals with diabetes, examining the effect of family and peer relationships, developmental processes, and decision making strategies on psychological, behavioral and physiological outcomes during adolescence and emerging adulthood. Her work has incorporated a variety of quantitative and qualitative research designs.
Matt Schonlau
Matthias Schonlau, (PhD, Statistics, University of Waterloo), is head of the RAND statistical consulting service. Prior to joining RAND, he held positions with the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and with AT&T Labs Research, and taught at Rutgers University. Dr. Schonlau has extensive experience in guiding statistical aspects of health related projects. His scientific and policy research interests include applications in the health sciences, profiling and causal inference, and primary data collection of patient data through web surveys. He was the lead statistician in RAND’s ICICE studying structure-process-outcome links, the Cost of Cancer Treatment Study, an evaluation of pharmacy compliance with California Law SB393 and others. In 2005, American Medical News published a piece on Dr. Schonlau’s work on evaluating an Asthma Collaborative. In 2001, his team won a second place in the data mining competition at the world's largest conference on data mining "KDD".
Dana Schultz
Dana Schultz (MPP, Harvard University) is an associate policy analyst in RAND Health, with 10 years of experience in research design, data analysis, and program evaluation, including designing surveys and interviews with project and agency staff; managing data collection and processing; applying and interpreting multivariate statistics; analyzing and synthesizing data into findings reports; and conducting focus groups. Her skills also include evaluating programs using logic models, on-site and telephone interviews, and case study techniques. Her research interests include child welfare, child health, child safety, and violence prevention. Currently, Ms. Schultz serves on the project leadership team for the National Evaluation of Safe Start Promising Approaches and as a co-principal investigator on a grant to conduct secondary data analysis using the National Survey of Child Adolescent Well Being. While at RAND, she has also conducted program evaluations for a suicide prevention program, a public health preparedness project, and an initiative to establish interdisciplinary geriatric research centers. Prior to joining RAND, Ms. Schultz was a senior policy analyst at Westat, where she served as the task leader and primary analyst on several major Federal contracts in the areas of child welfare services, child abuse and neglect, missing children, and runaways.
Claude Setodji
Claude Messan Setodji (PhD, Statistics, University of Minnesota) is a statistician at RAND with interest in applications of statistics to public policy, causal inferences, sampling techniques, data reduction and visualization. He designed the sampling frame for the RAND-CDC study that evaluates the scope of rapid HIV testing in urban U.S. hospitals. He was also part of the RAND-CDC team that assessed the influence of immunization rates on the likelihood of influenza-like illness clusters in nursing facilities. Dr. Setodji has extensive experience in quality of health care assessment and he co-authored the article “Who is at greatest risk for receiving poor-quality health care?”, for the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the top medical journals, that has important policy implications on how health care is delivered in the US.
William Shadel
William G. Shadel (PhD, Clinical Health Psychology and Social/Personality Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago) is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND. Prior to joining RAND in 2005, he was on the faculty at Brown University and the University of Pittsburgh. His main areas of expertise are in substance use and abuse across the lifespan with a specific focus on smoking and tobacco use. His research ranges from basic human laboratory work designed to understand the biopsychosocial mechanisms that contribute to smoking initiation and cessation, to evaluating cognitive-behavioral and pharmacological smoking cessation interventions in the clinic and in public health settings. Current grants from the NIH investigate how cigarette advertisements contribute to adolescent smoking behavior and how adolescents with different levels of experience with smoking respond to the messages used in anti-smoking Public Service Announcements. He has been or is currently on the editorial board of several peer review journals and has served as a regular member on several grant review panels at the NIH since 1999. He is currently associate editor of the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.
Shoshana Shelton
Shoshana Shelton (MPH, Health Behavior/Disease Prevention, Ohio State University), is a Project Associate/Project Manager at RAND Corporation. Her current projects focus on developing performance measures, program evaluation, and crisis decision making. Ms. Shelton is a FEMA certified Master Exercise Practitioner (MEP), and has designed, implemented, and evaluated exercises for public health agencies throughout the nation. Before joining RAND, she spent three years as a Program Manager at the Center for Public Health Preparedness at The Ohio State University, where she developed and delivered trainings to public health agencies and response partners; topics included exercise design, risk communication, social marketing, and health education.
Melony Sorbero
Melony Sorbero (PhD, Health Services Research and Health Policy, MS, Public Policy Analysis, University of Rochester) is a policy researcher at RAND. A health services researcher with a background in public policy analysis and public health, her research interests include quality of care, economic effects of variations in medical care and program evaluation. Dr. Sorbero currently has projects in breast cancer quality of care and outcomes, pay for performance, and patient safety. Examples of her work related to medical decision making and cost-effectiveness analysis are the cost-effectiveness analysis of palivizumab as a prophylaxis for RSV infection in premature infants, cost-effectiveness of treatment strategies for DCIS, the extent to which patient gender impacts physicians’ assessment of the likelihood of coronary artery disease, and work to understand the extent to which people include productivity costs in their assessment of health states. Dr. Sorbero’s current work is funded by a mix of grants and contracts from the National Cancer Institute, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, CMS, ASPE (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation in the US Department of Health & Human Services), HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration in the US Department of Health & Human Services) and the DoD (Department of Defense).
Bradley Stein
Bradley Stein (MD, MPH, University of Pittsburgh; PhD, RAND Graduate School) is associate director for mental and behavioral health in the RAND Center for Domestic and International Health Security and a natural scientist at RAND. He is the senior director of Research, Evaluation, and Outcomes at Community Care Behavioral Health Organization and a visiting associate professor of psychiatry at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He has extensive experience in the school mental health and child trauma field at both the local and national levels. He is lead author of a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) documenting the effectiveness of a program providing school-based mental health services to children exposed to violence that was developed as part of a participatory research collaboration between RAND, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and UCLA. He is also leading a federally funded study examining the implementation of the LAUSD Youth Suicide Prevention Program. His other current research activities include a study of the social and functional impact of depression in teens identified in school-based health clinics and in other primary care settings, an examination of treatment patterns for youth diagnosed with PTSD, ongoing analyses of national survey data regarding American’s emotional and behavioral response to terrorism, and research examining behavioral health issues and strategies related to terrorism and bioterrorism preparedness and response.
Susan Straus
Susan Straus (PhD, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, University of Illinois) is a behavioral scientist at RAND and adjunct associate professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining RAND in 2001, she was on the faculty in organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Straus's research addresses the social impacts of information and communication technologies. Specific research interests include applications of information technology in health care settings and adoption and use of collaborative technologies for distributed teams. Current and recent projects include an assessment of the development of regional health information organizations; a study of provider-patient interactions in information technology-guided disease management interventions; and a longitudinal study of adoption of wireless communication devices (BlackBerries) for law enforcement teams. Dr. Straus has extensive experience in survey design and analysis, content analysis, experimental and quasi-experimental methods, and field research.
Carrie Teh
Carrie Farmer Teh (PhD, Health Policy, Harvard University) is an associate policy researcher at RAND and completed a NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include mental health, health care quality, and health information technology. In a NIMH-funded study, she used longitudinal survey data to evaluate depression care quality for individuals with comorbid chronic health conditions and investigated the process-outcome relationship between depression quality measures and social and clinical outcomes among individuals with comorbid chronic pain and depression. In a secondary analysis of data from a randomized clinical trial of adults with anxiety disorders, she investigated the effect of comorbid pain on recovery from anxiety symptoms. Currently, she is part of a team that is conducting a large evaluation of the mental health care provided by the VA and is working on several other projects related to the mental health of veterans and active duty service members.
Shannah Tharp-Taylor
Shannah Tharp-Taylor (PhD, Developmental Psychology, University of Pittsburgh) is an associate researcher at RAND. Her study of developmental psychology focuses on the interface between social contexts and children's behaviors and mental health. Prior to coming to RAND, her research investigated children adopted from socially neglectful foreign orphanages (Tharp-Taylor & McCall, 2006). Her past work also includes research on gender differences in pre-adolescent students’ affinities towards various types of social interactions in domestic and academic settings and their perceptions of adult approval for their behaviors (Tharp-Taylor & Nelson-Le Gall, 2005). At present, Dr. Tharp-Taylor is co-principal investigator on a secondary data analysis of the National Survey on Child and Adolescent Well-Being. Her current work with adolescent populations also includes an investigation of the features of anti-smoking public service announcements that are most effective in influencing adolescents' thinking about smoking. She is also working on evaluation projects designed to assess the quality of services provided at the community level and nationally, and assisting in RAND’s policy research efforts in the hurricane affected gulf coast region, by developing a survey of school principals in districts that are educating children displaced by Katrina and Rita.
Henry Willis
Henry H. Willis (PhD, Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University; MS, Environmental Engineering and Science, University of Cincinnati) is a policy researcher at RAND. His research applies decision analytic tools and risk analysis to help decision-makers choose among competing resource management strategies or policy options. He has used this approach to address the technical, economic, institutional, and social components of problems related to homeland security, maritime security, national security, public health and emergency preparedness, and management of federal research and development programs. Examples of Dr. Willis’ recent research include: assessing risk-based approaches to allocating homeland security preparedness resources; reviewing current and proposed countermeasures for protecting U.S. maritime transportation infrastructure; and applying capabilities-based planning to missile defense. Prior to joining RAND, he worked for several years as an environmental engineer.
Hao Yu
Hao Yu (PhD, Health Services Research and Policy, University of Rochester; Master in Medicine, Shanghai Medical University, Shanghai, China) is an associate policy researcher for RAND Health. His research interests focus on health insurance market, international health, and access to, expenditures on, and quality of health care for children, especially children with special health care needs. He is currently involved in research project on patient safety, and access to care. Prior to coming to the U.S., he spent six years as an assistant professor at the Shanghai Medical University, Shanghai, China, studying China's health insurance reform in the 1990s. Those studies were funded by international agencies, such as the International Health Policy Program in Washington, D.C., the International Development Research Center in Ottawa, Canada, the British Council in London, UK, and the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. As part of those studies, he worked for one year as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, U.K. His previous research also included an investigation of antibiotics over-use in primary care, and a cost-effectiveness analysis of parasitic diseases control in China.
Karen Yuhas
Karen Yuhas (RN, NP, MS, MPH, Syracuse University, University of California, Los Angeles) is a certified adult nurse practitioner with years of experience conducting community-based research projects including the hiring, training, and supervision of field technicians and research interviewers. Ms. Yuhas has developed survey interview instruments, written procedure and field manuals and conducted physical assessments designed specifically for data collection. On RAND projects, she has been the lead abstractor for a team of RNs abstracting medical records using data collection software, has oriented new abstractors and written abstraction guidelines. She is currently the project manager for the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey.