India Ornelas’ research focuses on racial and ethnic health disparities, social determinants of health, Latino and immigrant populations, and health promotion interventions. She conducts community-based participatory research– to identify how social and cultural factors influence health disparities in racial/ethnic minority and immigrant communities. She employs both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to obtain a richer understanding of both the causes and consequences of health disparities and design interventions. She has published on these topics in Social Science and Medicine, Annual Review of Public Health and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. She is currently working with community partners, Casa Latina and El Centro de la Raza, to test an intervention to reduce stress and prevent depression among Latina immigrant women.
Professor Nurius studies processes and effects of stress and trauma focusing on vulnerable and socially disadvantaged populations, early/preventive intervention, and fostering resilience. Her research on life course stress integrates structural, psychosocial, and biobehavioral mechanisms, distinguishing direct, cumulative, and interactive effects of early and later life stress exposures alongside protective factors. A mental health specialist, she is increasingly focusing on comorbid physical, mental, and behavioral health outcomes as well as incorporating effects of the environment (e.g., air pollution, neighborhood characteristics) in multi-level models to explain stress responding and disparities in health and functioning outcomes. She works with field associates in examining effects of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) alongside later life adversities on health, learning, and development outcomes in Washington state. She co-leads a West Coast Poverty Center Roundtable on Early Life Adversity & Poverty that convenes researchers, service providers, policy leaders and funders.
William Zumeta holds a joint appointment as professor in the College of Education. He served as associate dean of the Evans School from 2001-05 and acting dean from March-August, 1988. He has been faculty coordinator for the Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management program since 2008. He is also co-director of the Collaborative Researchers in Education Sciences Training (CREST) program, an interdepartmental Ph.D. training program supported by the U.S. Department of Education. He was the recipient of the Graduate Dean’s Award in 2010-11 for service to graduate education at the University of Washington.
Zumeta teaches in the areas of policy analysis and public policies toward higher education and education and the workforce. His research interests focus on higher education policy including accountability; finance; graduate education and academic research policies; public policies affecting private higher education; and education and workforce policies. He was a senior fellow of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education from 2005-2011 and has been a fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute since 2008. He was president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, a national scholarly organization, in 2009-10.
Professor Zumeta’s research has been supported by a wide range of government agencies, foundations, and national groups. He previously taught at the University of British Columbia, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Claremont Graduate University, and worked for the City Council of Philadelphia and the California State Department of Finance.
Zumeta holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and a MPP from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a BA in Political Science from Haverford College.
Emily Williams is an addictions health services and disparities researcher and an implementation scientist. She holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Health Services and Director of the Doctoral Program in Health Services at the University of Washington and a core investigator and co-director of the post-doctoral fellowship at the Denver-Seattle Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered Value-Driven Care at VA Puget Sound Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D). She has longstanding interests in health behavior and the mechanisms (both societal- and healthcare-level) that help drive behavior change, particularly as these relate to vulnerable populations and stigmatized conditions. Her research is specifically focused on increasing access to evidence-based treatments for unhealthy alcohol and other substance use in diverse medical settings, including understanding and promoting equity in this care for vulnerable patient subpopulations (e.g., those with HIV and HCV, racial/ethnic minorities, persons living in rural areas, transgender patients, and women). She currently leads research focused on understanding patterns of alcohol use and care across transgender status, tailoring and testing practice facilitation to implement evidence-based alcohol-related care in hepatology clinics, and increasing access to evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorders in primary care.
Over the last 25 years, Peter Vitaliano’s work has focused on relationships between stress and health in several risk groups (spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors). He has developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These psychosocial and behavioral measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. He has also focused on moderators of such relationships, such as gender, personality, and co-morbidities. He has used primarily multicohort long-term studies that allow for interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. He attempted to identify mechanisms that can be potentially altered to have long-term public health significance in persons under chronic stress. He has also attempted to isolate groups that are at high risk for negative outcomes. In a perfect world, interventions should be used to help all persons who have deleterious responses to stress, but society can not afford this. In many cases, funds allocated to prolong life in older adults or even to enhance their quality of life may take funds away from children or other groups unable to care for themselves. For this reason, the identification of high risk groups is imperative for maximizing the effect of interventions.
His research program’s long range goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive health problems. The group is examining caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically-similar spouse non-caregivers across time and assessing the degree to which elevated depression, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. They are also attempting to replicate their earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks. For example, physiological dysregulation that is specific to a disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history, HbA1c with diabetes) is exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but no such differences occur in caregivers versus non-caregivers without a chronic disease.
Karen Snedker’s research and academic training provides a high level of experience and expertise directly related to demographical and ecological studies. Since the beginning of her career as an NIH post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s School of Nursing, she has worked in interdisciplinary projects and collaborative teams. In her research, she often works with students (both undergraduate and graduate) and other faculty members in a variety of disciplines. She has been able to maintain an active research agenda despite her professorial position at a teaching university. The majority of her research centered on adolescence, prevention and neighborhood context, including two NIH grants. It generally falls into four main areas: 1) crime and community; 2) urban sociology; 3) adolescence and prevention; and 4) health. The scope of her published work appears in sociology, geography, demography, public health and crime academic outlets. Her research reflects traditional sociological work as well as interdisciplinary research with direct implications for prevention research and public policy. Her current research program is two-fold. First, she recently published a book on mental health courts, Therapeutic Justice – Crime, Treatment Courts and Mental Illness (2018). The book provides a unique mixed methodological study of mental health courts within the framework of the larger trend towards problem-solving courts. Second, in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer McKinney (SPU), she is working on a book on homelessness and the rise of tent cities based on qualitative interviews with Tent City 3 residents and a census of tents in the city of Seattle.
Ali Rowhani-Rahbar is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Professor of Epidemiology, Professor of Pediatrics, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy & Governance, and Director of the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at the University of Washington. Rowhani-Rahbar’s research focuses on the evaluation of community-based interventions, social programs, and public policies for their impact on multiple forms of violence with a particular emphasis on preventing firearm-related harm. Specifically, his work focuses on intersections of the healthcare system with the civil and criminal legal system to develop and inform equitable initiatives that prevent firearm violence and promote public health, public safety, and well-being of communities. In recognition of his innovative, interdisciplinary, and impactful research contributions to firearm violence prevention, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023.
Rowhani-Rahbar has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Board of the National Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, Firearm Data Infrastructure Workgroup of the Safe States Alliance, Advisory Committee of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research & Education, Board of Directors of the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research, Advisory Board of the Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program, and Editorial Board of Injury Prevention.
Since 2012, Rowhani-Rahbar has cotaught core epidemiologic methods courses at the University of Washington and mentored numerous trainees in research methods and violence prevention. He received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020 and the University of Washington School of Public Health Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2023. He received his MD from Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in Iran, MPH from Yale University, and PhD from the University of Washington. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University and research fellowship at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.
Dr. Phipps’s research interests span the fields of cancer epidemiology, molecular epidemiology, and clinical epidemiology. Her current projects focus on the relationship between modifiable lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, obesity) and survival in individuals with biologically-distinct subtypes of colorectal cancer, and the impact of sleep and sleep disorders on cancer incidence and survival. She also has an interest in molecular subtypes of breast cancer, particularly in risk factors for the poor-prognosis triple-negative subtype of breast cancer.