Stephanie Cook is a James Weldon Johnson Professor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Social & Behavioral Health at New York University. She has wide expertise in the development of statistical models for determining associations between biological and behavioral risk factors and health outcomes in large population-based cohort and intervention study designs. She is the Director of the Attachment and Health Disparities Research Laboratory at NYU’s School of Global Public Health where she and her research team conducted research and intervention studies that focus on evaluating the mechanistic links between minority stressors and health disparities (social and biological) in emerging adulthood.
Dr. Stephanie Cook’s overarching research focus is to understand how structural- and individual-level minority stressors contribute to mental health, physical health, and health behaviors across the life span. Further, she seeks to understand how features of close relationships can exacerbate or buffer the negative effects of minority stress on health. Her work primarily focuses on young adults transitioning to adulthood who are at the intersection of racial/ethnic and sexual orientation status. In addition, much of her current work examines the links between minority stress (i.e., daily experiences of discrimination) and biological markers of stress (e.g. cortisol and c-reactive protein).
Dr. Cook and her team’s long-term goal is to continue creating, implementing, and refining sustainable interventions to reduce the influence of stress on health utilizing innovative methodologies.
Steven Bourassa is H. Jon and Judith M. Runstad Endowed Professor and Chair of the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Previously, he served as department chair at Florida Atlantic University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Louisville, where he was KHC Real Estate Research Professor. His research focuses on urban housing and land markets and policy, covering a range of topics including housing tenure, residential property valuation, property taxation, housing affordability, low-income housing policy, community land trusts, and public land leasehold. He has published his research in numerous real estate and related journals, such as the Journal of Housing Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Real Estate Research, and Journal of Urban Economics, as well as Real Estate Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Urban Studies. His co-edited book, Leasing Public Land: Policy Debates and International Experiences, was published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Dr. Bourassa is on the editorial boards of eight real estate journals. He is a Fellow of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics and received the Research Achievement Award from the International Real Estate Society, of which he is a past President. He is currently Treasurer of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
S. Joseph Shin is an Assistant Professor of Management at University of Washington, Tacoma. His research focus is on the nexus of organization theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. He aims to enhance scholarly knowledge about the entrepreneurial growth and scaling of high-growth nascent ventures in technology-based industries known as unicorn ventures. A unicorn venture is a private firm valued at more than one billion dollars. Using an extensive and novel longitudinal dataset and robust identification strategy, he attempts to better understand the antecedents and consequences of ventures’ high growth and fast-paced scaling.
Michelle Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing at the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing (SON). Prior to joining UW SON, she completed postdoctoral training in Population Health Sciences focusing on implementation science and cancer equity with Dr. Jennifer Tsui in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. As a public health nurse researcher with academic background in cervical cancer prevention (human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccination and HPV self-sampling) and clinical experience in safety-net clinic settings, her work focuses on application of implementation science methods to improve cancer care delivery for medically underserved populations.
She also obtained additional training in multilevel intervention research in cancer at the Multilevel Intervention Training Institute (MLTI), which is hosted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences.
Lianne Sheppard is the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) and Professor in the UW Department of Biostatistics. In 2021, Dr. Sheppard was named to the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship, which supports faculty with expertise in the health impacts of chemical exposures. Her current research portfolio includes several studies of air pollution exposures and their neurotoxicant effects. She has a PhD in biostatistics.
Her methodological interests center on observational study methods, exposure modeling, study design, and epidemiology. Her applied research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental exposures. She is principal investigator of a NIH-funded training grant called Biostatistics, Epidemiologic & Bioinformatics Training in Environmental Health, and she oversees the SURE-EH training program, a project to promote diversity in the environmental health sciences. She is also co-principal investigator of the NIH-funded Adult Changes in Thought Air Pollution study and of a Health Effects Institute study to better understand the role of exposure assessment design and modeling in inference about air pollution health effects.
Dr. Sheppard provides biostatistical leadership for several projects. She collaborates with DEOHS faculty on air pollution cohort studies, identifying the effects of multi-pollutant exposures as well as manganese exposures. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2021, she was named chair of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
Dr. Sheppard is Chair of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and a member of the EPA Scientific Advisory Board. She currently serves on the National Research Council Committee for the Review of EPA’s 2021 Formaldehyde Assessment, as well as the Environmental Sciences Review Panel of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She is a former member of the Health Effects Institute Review Committee and has served on several EPA scientific advisory panels, most recently for the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Science Advisory Committee On Chemicals (SACC) Asbestos Panel.
Rachel Prusynski is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research agenda is to inform equitable policy and facilitate quality evidence-based rehabilitative care to reduce disability, especially for socioeconomically vulnerable patients. She is a health services researcher focusing on relationships between rehabilitation processes and outcomes in post-acute care, with an emphasis on the impact of health policy on therapy practice and patient outcomes. Her work examines policies and system factors impacting the fragmented skilled nursing facility (SNF) industry, where variability in therapy practice and outcomes is especially high and rehabilitation research lags compared to other healthcare settings.
As a physical therapist, board-certified neurologic specialist, and therapy instructor with ten years of experience in settings with limited resources such as Haiti, she has experienced firsthand the myriad systemic challenges in providing evidence-based care and gaps in access to care for historically marginalized groups. Encountering these systematic barriers has led to her interest in implementation science, policy, and translational health services research.
Her PhD coursework was designed around three cognates: Large Data Analysis, Health Services and Policy, and Global Implementation Science. Her dissertation was supported by the American Physical Therapy Association Health Policy & Administration Research Grant, a Foundation for Physical Therapy Research scholarship, and the University of Washington Institute for Translational Health Science (ITHS) TL1 training program. She has published multiple studies using large data to address gaps in the knowledge of baseline relationships between rehabilitation processes and patient outcomes in SNFs prior to 2019 Medicare Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM).
Julianne Meisner is a veterinarian and epidemiologist and early-stage investigator. Her research combines her dual training to tackle complex questions surrounding human health risks at the human-animal-environment interface, largely focused on the effect of livestock keeping on human health among rural communities. Her position as a veterinarian in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington is unique, simultaneously fostering both independence and innovation in her research, and depth in her collaborative network. Her burgeoning research track is situated within both epidemiologic methods and One Health research, affording her the opportunity to bridge gaps between these two communities and identify nuances inherent to research questions at the human-animal-interface that have been previously overlooked.
Most recently, she has been working to bring network modeling (a tool borrowed from the social sciences and increasingly applied to infectious disease epidemiology) to the human-animal interface. She believes this approach holds great promise for early detection of novel pathogen emergence, and for refined control of endemic zoonoses. Her work also tackles social and political determinants of health from a One Health framework; she recently developed a Political One Health theoretical framework, which underpins recent efforts to examine land tenure and governance among minoritized populations as critical drivers of land use change, widely accepted to be a major determinant of novel pathogen emergence.
Kristian Jones’ program of research examines how youth mentoring can be utilized to promote positive outcomes for Black youth. As part of his commitment to serving diverse youth, families and communities, his scholarship examines how community-based interventions (such as mentoring) meet the unique needs of vulnerable youth to prevent detrimental outcomes and enhance positive youth development. His current research focuses on how community-based youth mentoring programs promote social justice in the communities they serve. As a Black male scholar, Jones’ research is grounded in his passion for equity and inclusion, specifically as it relates to marginalized youth.
In addition to his research and teaching experience, Jones worked as a behavioral health counselor at the Potter’s House Family and Children Treatment Center in Stone Mountain, GA and was a foster care counselor at Youth Villages in Cookeville, TN. Jones’ clinical experience contributes to his desire to have his research make a tangible impact with individuals and their communities.
Prior to joining the faculty at the UW School of Social Work, Jones received his PhD in social work from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s of education in counseling from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Albany State University in Albany, GA.
Alison Fohner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Associate Director of the Institute for Public Health Genetics at the University of Washington. As an epidemiologist with multidisciplinary training in genomics, pharmaceutics, bioethics, and data science, she is passionate about identifying sources of individual variability in biomarkers and disease risk, and translating those discoveries into better therapies and population screening. The setting for her research is primarily the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), where she has conducted several epidemiologic investigations over the past several years, primarily focused on outcomes related to dementia and cognition.
She is the PI of a K01 grant from the National Institute for Aging focused on identifying plasma proteomic biomarkers associated with cognitive decline and dementia within the CHS cohort. She is also leading efforts within CHS to assay circulating amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau levels in relation to incident dementia and cognitive decline.
In addition to her work with the CHS, she partners with communities in the Yukon Kuskokwim River Delta of Alaska to answer community-driven questions. These questions have included evaluating the influence of diet-derived poly-unsaturated fatty acids on vitamin D levels and drug metabolism, and studying how the transition away from traditional Yup’ik diets is influencing health outcomes. She is passionate about interdisciplinary research that leverages diverse expertise to answer pressing questions in population health.
Kemi M. Doll is a gynecologic oncologist and health services researcher on faculty as an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington. Her training is in epidemiology and clinical research, which she uses to apply health equity frameworks to long-standing racial inequities in endometrial cancer (EC). She has expertise in population-level analyses, community-engaged research, and patient-reported outcomes.
At the University of Washington since 2016, she has pursued a bold and broad research agenda to eliminate the Black-White mortality gap in EC, securing several peer-reviewed, competitive grants from the National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparity (NIMHD). In her early career, she received a highly competitive, individual RWJF career development award (Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program), to carry out patient, provider and system level studies to identify modifiable factors to target for intervention for early detection of EC.