Research Associate II/Data Manager, Prevention Research Center
Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation
CSDE Research Areas:
Dr. Helgeson is a multidisciplinary social scientist with experience in primary and secondary data collection and analysis, creating and integrating datasets from multiple sources, and archiving primary material. After completing her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a concurrent fellowship with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, she joined the Prevention Research Center (PRC) in Berkeley, California in 2023.
In her work with PRC, she contributes to drug and alcohol prevention research through the PRC Center Grant, an NIAAA-funded project focusing on environmental approaches to the prevention of drug and alcohol problems. This research examines questions surrounding local policies and availability of alcohol and cannabis and how these relate to their use and co-use. She also works on an NIAAA-funded study of Tribal alcohol control policies under Tribal IRB oversight, co-led by UW’s Dr. Myra Parker, which harnesses large deidentified datasets for geospatial analyses of health outcomes related to various alcohol policies operationalized by Tribal Councils. A connecting thread in Dr. Helgeson’s work is her interest in the relationships between history, culture, the environment, and human behavior. Her bachelor’s degree was in Geography/Environmental Studies, and she has brought a geospatial framework to thinking about social problems.
Her previous research trajectory concerns Indigenous language vitality and includes Indigenous language documentation in collaboration with community members. She has worked with language consultants both in the US and in Papua New Guinea. She has also studied policies and programs that are effective at promoting Indigenous language vitality, such as child-directed bilingual education and language immersion programs. As a PhD student, she was a fellow with the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Student Fellowship Program and a recipient of the Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship and Pre-Dissertation Research Award.